Topic: Latin American Mythology (new ocr old one too many errors)

[Prometheus]

From this deluge one man and one woman were saved on a
mountain called Tamancu — the Tamanac Ararat — and
“casting behind them, over their heads, the fruits of the mauri-
tia palm-tree, they saw the seeds contained in those fruits pro-
duce men and women, who repeopled the earth.” After many
deeds, in which Amalivaca regulated the world in true heroic
fashion, he departed to the shores beyond the seas, whence he
came and where he is supposed still to dwell.

Another myth, of the Cariban stock,13 tells how Makonaima,
having created heaven and earth, sat on a silk-cotton-tree by a
river, and cutting off pieces of its bark, cast them about, those
which touched the water becoming fish, and others flying in the
air as birds, while from those that fell on land arose animals
and men. Boddam-Whetham gives a later addition, account-
ing for the races of men: “The Great Spirit Makanaima made
a large mould, and out of this fresh, clean clay the white man
stepped. After it got a little dirty the Indian was formed, and
the Spirit being called away on business for a long period the
mould became black and unclean, and out of it walked the
negro.” As in case of other demiurges, there are many stories
of the transformations wrought by Makonaima.

It is from the Warau that Brett obtains a story of a descent
from the sky-world — a tale which has many replications in
other parts of America, and of which there are other Orinoco
variants. Long ago, when the Warau lived in the happy hunt-
ing-grounds above the sky, Okonorote, a young hunter, shot an
arrow which missed its mark and was lost; searching for it,
he found a hole through which it had fallen; and looking down,
he beheld the earth beneath, with game-filled forests and sa-
vannahs. By means of a cotton rope he visited the lands below,
and upon his return his reports were such as to induce the
whole Warau tribe to follow him thither; but one unlucky dame,
too stout to squeeze through, was stuck in the hole, and the
Warau were thus prevented from ever returning to the sky-
world. Since the lower world was exceedingly arid, the great
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Spirit created a small lake of delicious water, but forbade the
people to bathe in it — this to test their obedience. A certain
family, consisting of four brothers — Kororoma, Kororomana,
Kororomatu, and Kororomatitu — and two sisters — Korobona
and Korobonako— dwelt beside this mere; the men obeyed
the injunction as to bathing, but the two sisters entered the
water, and one of them swimming to the centre of the lake,
touched a pole which was planted there. The spirit of the pool,
who had been bound by the pole, was immediately released;
and seizing the maiden, he bore her to his sub-aquatic den,
whence she returned home pregnant; but the child, when born,
was normal and was allowed to live. Again she visited the
water demon and once more brought forth a child, but this
one was only partly human, the lower portion of the body being
that of a serpent. The brothers slew the monster with arrows;
but after Korobona had nursed it to life in the concealment of
the forest, the brothers, having discovered the secret, again
killed the serpent-being, this time cutting it in pieces. Koro-
bona carefully collected and buried all the fragments of her
offspring’s body, covering them with leaves and vegetable
mould; and she guarded the grave assiduously until finally
from it arose a terrible warrior, brilliant red in colour, armed
for battle, this warrior being the first Carib, who forthwith
drove from their ancient hunting-grounds the whole Warau
tribe.

This myth contains a number of interesting features. It is
obviously invented in part to explain why the Warau (who are
execrated by whites and natives alike for their dirtiness) do not
bathe; and it no doubt reflects their actual yielding before the
invading Carib tribes. The Kororomana of the story can
scarcely be other in origin that the Kururumany whom Schom-
burgk states to be the Arawak creator; while the whole group
of four brothers are plausibly continental forms of the Haitian
Caracarols, the shell-people who brought about the flood. The
incident of the corpulent or pregnant woman (im Thurn gives
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the latter version) stopping the egress of the primitive people
from their first home appears in Kiowa, Mandan, and Pueblo
tales in North America; while the pole rising from the lake has
analogues in the Californian and North-West Coast regions.
Im Thurn states that the Carib have a variant of this same
story, in which they assign as the reason for the descent of
their forefathers from Paradise their desire to cleanse the dirty
and disordered world below — an amusing complement to the
Warau notion!

The Warau have also their national hero, Abore, who has
something of the character of a true culture hero. Wowta, the
evil Frog-Woman, made Abore her slave while he was yet a boy,
and when he grew up, she wished to marry him; but he cleverly
trapped her by luring her into a hollow tree filled with honey, of
which she was desperately fond, and there wedging her fast.
He then made a canoe and paddled to sea to appear no more,
though the Warau believe that he reached the land of the
white men and taught them the arts of life; Wowta escaped
from the tree only by taking the form of a frog, and her dismal
croaking is still heard in the woods.

From the tribes of this region come various other myths, be-
longing, apparently, to the cosmogonic and demiurgic cycles.
The Arawak tell of two destructions of the earth, once by
flame and once by fire, each because men disobeyed the will
of the Dweller-on-High, Aiomun Kondi; and they also have
a Noachian hero, Marerewana, who saved himself and his
family during the deluge by tying his canoe with a rope of
great length to a large tree. Another Arawak tale begins with
the incident which opens the story of Maconaura. The Sun
built a dam to retain the fish in a certain place; but since,
during his absence, it was broken, so that the fish escaped, he
set the Woodpecker to watch, and, summoned by the bird’s
loud tapping, arrived in time to slay the alligator that was de-
stroying his preserves, the reptile’s scales being marks made by
the club wielded by the Sun. Another tale, of which there are
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both Arawak and Carib versions, tells how a young man married
a vulture and lived in the sky-land, revisiting his own people
by means of a rope which the spiders spun for him; but as the
vultures would thereafter have nothing to do with him, with
the aid of other birds he made war upon them and burned
their settlement. In this combat the various birds, by injury
or guile, received the marks which they yet bear; the owl
found a package which he greedily kept to himself; opening it,
the darkness came out, and has been his ever since. In the
Surinam version, given by van Coll,14 the hero of the tale is a
peaiman, Maconaholo, and the story contains some of the
incidents of the Maconaura tale. Two other traditions given
by the same author are of special interest from the comparative
point of view. One is the legend of an anchorite who had a
wonderfully faithful dog. Wandering in the forest, the hermit
discovered a finely cultivated field, with cassava and other food
plants, and thinking, “Who has prepared all this for me?” he
concealed himself in order to discover who might be his bene-
factor, when behold! his faithful dog appeared, transformed
herself into a human being, laid aside her dog’s skin, busied
herself with the toil of cultivation, and, the task accomplished,
again resumed her canine form. The native, carefully preparing,
concealed himself anew, and when the dog came once more, he
slyly stole the skin, carried it away in a courou-courou (a woman’s
harvesting basket), and burned it, after which the cultivator,
compelled to retain woman’s form, became his faithful wife
and the mother of a large family. It would appear that, from
an aboriginal point of view, both dog and woman are compli-
mented by this tale.

The second tale of special interest is a Surinam equivalent
of the story of Cain and Abel. Of three brothers, Halwanli, the
eldest, was lord of all things inanimate and irrational; Our-
wanama, the second, was a tiller of fields, a brewer of liquors,
and the husband of two wives; Hiwanama, the youngest, was a
huntsman. One day Hiwanama, chancing upon the territory of
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275

Ourwanama, met one of his brother’s wives, who first intoxi-
cated him and then seduced him, while in revenge for this
injury Ourwanama banished his brother, lying to his mother
when she demanded the lost son. Afterward Ourwanama’s
wives were transformed, the one into a bird, the other into a
fish; he himself, seized by the sea, was dragged to its depth;
and the desolate mother bemoaned her lost children till finally
Halwanli, going in search of Hiwanama, whom he found among
the serpents and other reptiles of the lower world, brought him
back to become the greatest of peaimen.

V. NATURE AND HUMAN NATURE

A missionary whom Humboldt quotes declares that a native
said to him:15 “Your God keeps himself shut up in a house, as
if he were old and infirm; ours is in the forest, in the fields, and
on the mountains of Sipapu, whence the rains come”; and
Humboldt remarks in comment that the Indians conceive with
difficulty the idea of a temple or an image: “on the banks of the
Orinoco there exists no idol, as among all the nations who have
remained faithful to the first worship of nature.”

There is an echo of the eighteenth century philosophy of an
idyllic primitive age in this statement, but there is truth in it,
too; for throughout the forest regions of tropical America
idols are of rare occurrence, while shrines, if such they may be
called, are confined to places of natural marvel, the wandering
tribes being true nature worshippers, with eyes ever open for
tokens of mysterious power. Fetishes or talismans are, how-
ever, common; and in this very connexion Humboldt mentions
the botuto, or sacred trumpet, as an object of veneration to
which fruits and intoxicating liquors were offered; sometimes
the Great Spirit himself makes the botuto to resound, and, as
in so many other parts of the world, women are put to death
if they but see this sacrosanct instrument or the ceremonies
of its cult (and here we are in the very presence of Mumbo
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Jumbo!). Certainly the use of the fetish-trumpet was wide-
spread in South America and northward. Garcilasso tells of
the use of dog-headed battle-trumpets by the wild tribes of
Andean regions; while Boddam-Whetham affords us another
indication of the trumpet’s significance:16 “Horn-blowing was
a very useful accomplishment of our guide, as it kept us straight
and frightened away the various evil spirits, from a water-
mama to a wood-demon.”

This latter author gives a vivid picture of the Orinoco Indian
in the life of nature: “Above all other localities, an Indian is
fond of an open, sandy beach whereon to pass the night. . . .
There in the open, away from the dark, shadowy forest, he feels
secure from the stealthy approach of the dreaded ‘kanaima’;
. . . the magic rattle of the ‘peaiman’ . . . has less terror
for him when unaccompanied by the rustling of the waving
branches; and there even the wild hooting of the ‘didi’ (the
c didi ’ is supposed to be a wild man of the woods, possessed of
immense strength and covered with hair) is bereft of that
intensity with which it pierces the gloomy depths of the sur-
rounding woodland. It is strange that the superstitious fear
of these Indians, who are bred and born in the forest and hills,
should be chiefly based on natural forms and sounds. Certain
rocks they will never point at with a finger, although your at-
tention may be drawn to them by an inclination of the head.
Some rocks they will not even look at, and others again they
beat with green boughs. Common bird-cries become spirit-
voices. Any place of difficult access, or little known, is in-
variably tenanted by huge snakes or horrible four-footed
animals. Otters are transformed into mermaids, and water-
tigers inhabit the deep pools and caves of their rivers.”

This is the familiar picture of the animist, surrounded by
monster-haunted marches, for which, in the works of many
writers, the Guiana aborigines have afforded the repeated
model. No description of the beliefs of these natives would be
complete without mention of the superstitions and adorations
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2 77

associated with Mt. Roraima, by which all travellers seem to be
impressed. Schomburgk 17 says that the native loves Roraima
as the Swiss loves his Alps: “All their festal songs have Roraima
for object. . . . Each morning and each evening came old
and young ... to greet us with bakong baimong (‘good day’)
or saponteng (‘good night’) . . . adding each time the words,
matti Roraima-tau, Roraima-tau (‘there, see our Roraima!’),
with the word tau very slowly and solemnly drawled”; and
one of their songs, which might be a fragment out of the Greek,
runs:

“Roraima of the red rocks, wrapped in clouds, ever-fertile source
of streams!”

On Roraima, says im Thurn, the natives declare there are
huge white jaguars, white eagles, and other such creatures;
and to this class he would add the “didis,” half man, half
monkey, who may very likely be a mere personification of the
howling monkeys which, as Humboldt states, the aborigines
so heartily detest. Boddam-Whetham, who ascended the moun-
tain, tells of many superstitions, as of a magic circle which
surrounds it, and of a demon-guarded sanctuary on the sum-
mit: “About half way up we met an unpleasant-looking Indian
who informed us that he was a great ‘ peaiman,’ and the spirit
which he possessed ordered us not to go to Roraima. The
mountain, he said, was guarded by an enormous ‘camoodi,’
which could entwine a hundred people in its folds. He himself
had once approached its den and seen demons running about
as numerous as quails. . . . Our Indians were rejoiced to see
us back again, as they had not expected that the mountain-
demons would allow us to return.”

Like great mountains, the orbs of heaven excite the native’s
adoration, though it is by no means necessary, on that account,
to follow certain theorists and to solarize or astralize all his
myths. Fray Ruiz Blanco states that “the supreme gods of
the Indians are the sun and the moon, at eclipses of which they
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make great demonstrations, sounding warlike instruments and
laying hold of weapons as a sign that they seek to defend them;
they water their maize in order to placate them and in loud
voice tell them that they will amend their ways,, labour, and
not be idle; and grasping their tools, they set themselves to
toil at the hour of eclipse.” Of similar reference is an observa-
tion of Humboldt’s: “Some Indians who were acquainted with
Spanish, assured us that zis signified not only the sun, but also
the Deity. This appeared to me the more extraordinary since
among all other American nations we find distinct words for
God and the sun. The Carib does not confound Tamoussicabo,
‘the Ancient of Heaven,’ with veyou, ‘the sun.’” In a similar
connexion he remarks that in American idioms the moon is
often called “the sun of night,” or “the sun of sleep”; but that
“our missionary asserted that jama, in Maco, indicated at
the same time both the Supreme Being and the great orbs of
night and day; while many other American tongues, for in-
stance Tamanac and Caribbee, have distinct words to desig-
nate God, the Moon, and the Sun.” It is, of course, quite
possible that such terms as zis and jama belong to the class
of Manito, Wakan, Huaca, and the like.

Humboldt records names for the Southern Cross and the
Belt of Orion, and Brett mentions a constellation called Camudi
from its fancied resemblance to the snake, though he does not
identify it. The Carib, he says, call the Milky Way by two
names, one of which signifies “the path of the tapir,” while
the other means “the path of the bearers of white clay” — a
clay from which they make vessels: “The nebulous spots are
supposed to be the track of spirits whose feet are smeared with
that material” — a conceit which surely points to the well-
nigh universal American idea of the Milky Way as the path of
souls. The Carib also have names for Venus and Jupiter; and
the Macusi, im Thurn says, regard the dew as the spittle of
stars.

In a picturesque passage Humboldt describes the beliefs
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279

connected with the Grotto of Caripe, the source of the river
of the same name. The cave is inhabited by nocturnal birds,
guacharos (Steatornis caripensis); and the natives are con-
vinced that the souls of their ancestors sojourn in its deep
recesses. “Man,” they say, “should avoid places which are
enlightened neither by the sun nor by the moon”; and they
maintain that poisoners and magicians conjure evil spirits
before the entrance; while “to join the guacharos” is a phrase
equivalent to being gathered to one’s fathers in the tomb.
Fray Ruiz records an analogous tenet: “They believe in the
immortality of the soul and that departing from the body,
it goes to another place — some souls to their own lands
(1heredades), but the most to a lake that they call Machira,
where great serpents swallow them and carry them to a land of
pleasure in which they entertain themselves with dancing and
feasting.” That ghosts of strong men return is an article of
common credence: the soul of Lope de Aguirre, as reported
not only by Humboldt, but by writers of our own day,18 still
haunts the savannahs in the form of a tongue of flame; and it
may be supposed that the similar idea which Boddam-Whetham
records among the negroes of Martinique with respect to the
soul of Pere Labat may be of American Indian origin. One
striking statement, which Brett quotes from a Mr. M’Clintock,
deserves repetition, as being perhaps as clear a statement as we
have of that ambiguity of life and death, body and soul, from
which the savage mind rarely works itself free: “He says that
the Kapohn or Acawoio races (those who have embraced
Christianity excepted) like to bury their dead in a standing
posture, assigning this reason, — ‘ Although my brother be in
appearance dead, he (i. e. his soul) is still alive.’ Therefore, to
maintain by an outward sign this belief in immortality some
of them bury their dead erect, which they say represents life,
whereas lying down represents death. Others bury their dead
in a sitting posture, assigning the same reason.” It is unlikely
that the Orinoco Indians have in mind such clear-cut sym-
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LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

holism of their custom as this passage suggests; but it is alto-
gether probable that the true reason for disposing the bodies
of the dead in life-like postures is man’s fundamental difficulty
wholly to dissociate life from the stark and unresponsive body;
and doubtless it is this very attitude of mind which leads them
also to what Fray Ruiz calls the error of ascribing souls to even
irrational beings — the same underlying theory which makes
of primitive men animists, and of philosophers idealists.
 CHAPTER IX

[Prometheus]

THE TROPICAL FORESTS: THE AMAZON
AND BRAZIL

I. THE AMAZONS1

ON his second voyage Columbus began to hear of an island
inhabited by rich and warlike women, who permitted
occasional visits from men, but endured no permanent residence
of males among them. The valour of Carib women, who fought
resolutely along with their husbands and brothers gave plausi-
bility to this legend; and soon the myth of an island or country
of Amazons became accepted truth, a dogma with wonder-
tellers and a lure to adventurers. At first the fabulous island
seemed near at hand — “Matenino which lies next to His-
panola on the side toward the Indies ”; but as island after island
was visited and the fabled women not found, their seat was
pushed further and further on, till it came to be thought of as a
country lying far in the interior of the continent or — for the
notion of its insular nature persisted — as an island somewhere
in the course of the great river of the Amazons. By the middle
of the sixteenth century, explorers from the north, from the
south, from the east, from the west, were all on the lookout for
the kingdom of women and all hearing and repeating tales
about them with such conviction that, as the Padre de Acuna
remarks,2 “it is not credible that a lie could have been spread
throughout so many languages, and so many nations, with such
appearance of truth.”

In 1540-41 Francisco de Orellana sailed down the Amazon
to the sea, hearing tales of the women warriors, and, as his
cleric companion, Fray Gaspar Carvajal, is credited with saying,
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on one occasion encountering some of them; for they fought
with Indians who defended themselves resolutely “because
they were tributaries of the Amazons,” and he, and other
Spaniards, saw ten or twelve Amazons fighting in front of the
Indians, as if they commanded them . . . “very tall, robust,
fair, with long hair twisted over their heads, skins round their
loins, and bows and arrows in their hands, with which they
killed seven or eight Spaniards.” The description, in the cir-
cumstances described, does not inspire unlimited confidence
in the friar’s certainty of vision, but there is nothing incredi-
ble even in Indian women leading their husbands in combat.
Pedro de Magelhaes de Gandavo gives a very interesting ac-
count 3 (still sixteenth century) of certain Indian women who,
as he says, take the vow of chastity, facing death rather than
its violation. These women follow no occupation of their sex,
but imitate the ways of men, as if they had ceased to be women,
going to war and to the hunt along with the men. Each of them,
he adds, is served and followed by an Indian woman with whom
she says she is married, and they live together like spouses.
Parallels for this custom, (and for the reverse, in which men
assume the costume, labours, and way of life of women) are to
be found far and wide in America, — indeed, to the Arctic
Zone. Magelhaes de Gandavo is authority, too, for the state-
ment that the coastal tribes of Brazil, like the Carib of the
north, have a dual speech, differing for the two sexes, at least
in some words; but this is no extremely rare phenomenon.

More truly in the mythical vein is the account given in the
tale of the adventures of Ulrich Schmidel. Journeying north-
ward from the city of Asuncion, in a company under the com-
mand of Hernando de Ribera, Schmidel and his companions
heard tales of the Amazons — whose land of gold and silver,
the Indians astutely placed at a two months’ journey from their
own land. “The Amazons have only one breast,” says Schmidel,
“and they receive visits from men only twice or thrice a year.
If a boy is born to them, they send him to the father; if a girl,
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they raise her, burning the right breast that it may not grow,
to the end that they may the more readily draw the bow, for
they are very valiant and make war against their enemies.
These women dwell in an isle, which can only be reached by
canoes.” In the same credulous vein, but with quaintly
learned embellishments, is Sir Walter Raleigh’s account: “I
had knowledge of all the rivers between Orenoque and Ama-
zones, and was very desirous to understand the truth of those
warlike women, because of some it is believed, of others not.
And though I digress from my purpose, yet I will set down
that which hath been delivered me for truth of those women,
and I spake with a cacique or lord of people, that told me h.e
had been in the river, and beyond it also. The nations of these
women are on the south side of the river in the provinces of
Topago, and their chiefest strengths and retracts are in the
islands situate on the south side of the entrance some sixty
leagues within the mouth of the said river. The memories of
the like women are very ancient as well in Africa as in Asia: In
Africa these had Medusa for queen: others in Scithia near the
rivers of Tanais and Thernodon: we find also that Lampedo
and Marethesia were queens of the Amazons: in many histories
they are verified to have been, and in divers ages and provinces:
but they which are not far from Guiana do accompany with
men but once in a year, and for the time of one month, which
I gather by their relation, to be in April: and that time all
kings of the border assemble, and queens of the Amazons; and
after the queens have chosen, the rest cast lots for their Valen-
tines. This one month they feast, dance, and drink of their
wines in abundance; and the moon being done, they all depart
to their own provinces. If they conceive, and be delivered of a
son, they return him to the father; if of a daughter, they nourish
it, and retain it: and as many as have daughters send unto the
begetters a present: all being desirous to increase their sex
and kind: but that they cut off the right dug of the breast,
I do not find to be true. It was farther told me, that if in these
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284

wars they took any prisoners that they used to accompany
with these also at what time soever, but in the end for certain
they put them to death: for they are said to be very cruel and
bloodthirsty, especially to such as offer to invade their ter-
ritories. These Amazons have likewise great store of these
plates of gold which they recover by exchange chiefly for a
kind of green stones, which the Spaniards callPiedras hijadas,
and we use for spleen stones: and for the disease of the stone we
also esteem them. Of these I saw divers in Guiana: and com-
monly every king or cacique hath one, which their wives for
the most part wear; and they esteem them as great jewels.”
The Amazon stone, or -piedra de la hijada, came to be im-
mensely valued in Europe for wonderful medicinal effects, —
a veritable panacea. Such stones were found treasured by the
tribes of northern and north-central South America, passing
by barter from people to people. “The form given to them most
frequently,” wrote Humboldt,4 “is that of the Babylonian
cylinders, longitudinally perforated, and loaded with inscrip-
tions and figures. But this is not the work of the Indians of
our day. . . . The Amazon stones, like the perforated and
sculptured emeralds, found in the Cordilleras of New Grenada
and Quito, are vestiges of anterior civilization.” Later writers
and investigators have identified the Amazon stones as green
jade, probably the chalchihuitl which formed the esteemed
jewel of the Aztecs; and it has been supposed that the centre
from which spread the veneration for greenish and bluish stones
— chiefly jade and turquoise —was somewhere in Mayan or
Nahuatlan territory. Certainly it was widespread, extending
from the Pueblos of New Mexico to the land of the Incas, and
eastward into Brazil and the Antilles. That the South American
tribes should have ascribed the origin of these treasures (at any
rate, when questioned) to the Amazons, the treasure women,
is altogether plausible. Nearly a century and a half after
Raleigh’s day, de la Condamine found the green jade stones
still employed by the Indians to cure colic and epilepsy, —
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285

heirlooms, they said, from their fathers who had received them
from the husbandless women. That the Indians themselves have
names for the Amazons is not strange — names with such mean-
ings as the Women-Living-Alone, the Husbandless-Women,
the Masterful-Women, — for the Europeans have been in-
quiring about such women ever since their coming; it is, how-
ever, worthy of note that Orellana, to whom is credited the
first use of “Amazon” as a name for the great river, also heard
a native name for the fabulous women; for Aparia, a native
chief, after listening to Orellana’s discourse on the law of God
and the grandeur of the Castillean monarch, asked, as it were
in rebuttal, whether Orellana had seen the Amazons, “whom
in his language they call Coniapuyara, meaning Great Lord.”

Modern investigators ascribe the myth of the Amazons,
undeniably widespread at an early date, to various causes.
The warlike character of many Indian women, already ob-
served in the first encounters with Carib tribes by Columbus,
is still attested by Spruce (1855): “I have myself seen that
Indian women can fight . . . the women pile up heaps of
stones to serve as missiles for the men. If, as sometimes hap-
pens, the men are driven back to and beyond their piles of
stones, the women defend the latter obstinately, and generally
hold them until the men are able to rally to the combat.”
Another factor in the myth is supposed to have been rumours
of the golden splendour of the Incaic empire, with perhaps
vague tales of the Vestals of the Sun; and still another is the
occurrence of anomalous social and sexual relationships of
women, easily exaggerated in passing from tribe to tribe.

A special group of myths of the latter type is of pertinent
interest. Ramon Pane and Peter Martyr give an example in
the tale of Guagugiana enticing the women away to Matenino.
A somewhat similar story is reported by Barboza Rodriguez
from the Rio Jamunda: the women, led away by an elder or
chief, were accustomed to destroy their male children; but one
mother spared her boy, casting him into the water where he
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LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

lived as a fish by day, returning to visit her at night in human
form; and the other women, discovering this, seduced the youth,
who was finally disposed of by the jealous old man, whereupon
the angry women fled, leaving the chief womanless. A like
story is reported by Ehrenreich from Amazonas: The women
gather beside the waters, where they make familiar with a
water-monster, crocodilean in form, which is slain by the
jealous men; then, the women rise in revolt, slay the men
through deceit, and fare away on the stream. From Guiana
Brett reports a myth on the same theme, the lover being,
however, in jaguar form. Very likely the story of Maconaura
and Anuanaitu belongs to the same cycle; and it is of more
than passing interest to observe that the story extends, along
with the veneration of green and blue stones, to the Navaho
and Pueblo tribes of North America, in the cosmogonies of
which appears the tale of the revolt of the women, their un-
natural relations with a water-monster, and their eventual
return to the men.5

Possibly the whole mythic cycle is associated with fertil-
ity ideas. Even in the arid Pueblo regions it is water from be-
low, welling up from Mother Earth, that appears in the myth,
and a water-dwelling being that is the agent of seduction.
In South America and the Antilles, where fish-food is important
and where the fish and the tortoise are recurring symbols of
fertility, it is natural to find the fabled women in this associa-
tion. And in this connexion it may be well to recall the dis-
coveries of L.Netto on the island of Marajo,at the mouth of the
Amazon.6 There he found two mounds, a greater and a smaller,
in such proportion that he regarded them as forming the image
of a tortoise. Within the greater, which he regarded as the seat
of a chieftain’s or chieftainess’s residence, — commanding the
country in every direction, — he discovered funeral urns and
other objects of a quality far superior to those known to tribes
of the neighbouring districts, — urns, hominiform in character,
many of them highly decorated, and very many of the finest
 
 PLATE XL

Vase from the Island of Marajo, with character-
istic decoration. The funeral vases and other re-
mains from this region have suggested to L. Netto
that here was the fabled Isle of the Amazons (see
pages 286-87). The vase pictured is in the American
Museum of Natural History.
 
 
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287

holding the bones of women. “If the tradition of a veritable
Amazonian Gyneocraty has ever had any raison d’etre,” said
Netto, “certainly we see something enough like it in this
nation of women ceramists, probably both powerful and nu-
merous, and among whom the women-chiefs enjoyed the
highest honours of the country.”

II. FOOD-MAKERS AND DANCE-MASKS

“The rites of these infidels are almost the same,” says the
Padre de Acuna.7 “They worship idols which they make with
their own hands; attributing power over the waters to some,
and, therefore, place a fish in their hands for distinction; others
they choose as lords of the harvests; and others as gods of their
battles. They say that these gods came down from Heaven
to be their companions, and to do them good. They do not
use any ceremony in worshipping them, and often leave them
forgotten in a corner, until the time when they become neces-
sary; thus, when they are going to war, they carry an idol in
the bows of their canoes, in which they place their hopes of
victory; and when they go out fishing, they take the idol
which is charged with dominion over the waters; but they do
not trust in the one or the other so much as not to recognize
another mightier God.”

This seventeenth century description is on the whole true to
the results obtained by later observers of the rites and beliefs of
the Amazonian Indians. To be sure, a certain amount of inter-
pretation is desirable: the idolos of Acuna are hardly idols in the
classical sense; rather they are in the nature of charms, fetishes,
ritual paraphernalia, trophies, — all that goes under the name
“medicine,” as applied to Indian custom. And it is true, too,
that in so vast a territory, and among peoples who, although
all savages, differ widely in habit of life, there are indefinite
variations both in custom and mental attitude. Some tribes
are but hunters, fishers, and root-gatherers; others practice
 288 LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY,

agriculture also. Some are clothed; many are naked. Some
practice cannibalism; others abhor the eaters of human flesh.
Any student of the miscellaneous observations on the beliefs
of the South American wild tribes, noted down by missionaries,
officials, naturalists, adventurers, professional ethnologists,
will at first surely feel himself lost in a chaos of contradiction.
Nevertheless, granted a decent detachment and cool perspec-
tive, eventually he will be led to the opinion that these con-
tradictions are not all due to the Indian; the prepossessions
and understandings of the observers is no small factor; and
even where the variation is aboriginal, it is likely to be in the
local colour rather than in the underlying fact. In this broad
sense Acuna’s free characterization hits the essential features
of Indian belief, in the tropical forests.

More than one later writer is in accord with the implicit em-
phasis which the Padre de Acuna places upon the importance of
the food-giving animals and plants in Indian lore and rite. Of
these food sources in many parts of South America the abun-
dant fish and other fluvial life is primary. Hugo Kunike has,
indeed, argued that the fish is the great symbol of fertility
among the wild forest tribes, supporting the contention with
analysis of the dances and songs, fishing customs, ornamenta-
tion-motives, and myths of these tribes.8 Certainly he has
shown that the fish plays an outstanding role in the imaginative
as well as in the economic life of the Indian, appearing, in one
group of myths, even as a culture hero and the giver of tobacco.
Even more than the fish, the turtle (“the beef of the Amazon”),
which is a symbol of generation in many parts of America, ap-
pears in Amazonian myth, where in versions of the Hare and
the Tortoise (here the Deer replaces the Hare), of the contest
of the Giant and the Whale pulling contrari-wise, and in simi-
lar fables the turtle appears as the Trickster. So, also, the frog,
which appears in magical and cosmogonical roles, — as in the
Canopus myth narrated by Teschauer, where a man married a
frog, and, becoming angered, cut off her leg and cast it into
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289

the river, where the leg became the fish surubim (Pimelodes
tigrinus), while the body rose to heaven to appear in the con-
stellation. The like tale is told by other tribes with respect to
Serpens and to the Southern Cross.

But important as water-life is to the Amazonian, it would ap-
pear from Pere Tastevin’s rebuttal of Kunike’s contention that
the Indian does not regard the fish with any speaking venera-
tion. The truth would seem to be that in South America, as in
North, it is the Elders of the Kinds, the ancestral guardians
and perpetuators of the various species, both of plants and
animals, that are appealed to, — dimly and magically by the
tribes lower in intelligence, with conscious ritual by the others.
Garcilasso de la Vega’s description of the religions of the more
primitive stratum of Peruvian times and peoples applies equally
to the whole of America: “They venerated divers animals,
some for their cruelty, as the tiger, the lion, the bear; . . .
others for their craft, as the monkeys and the fox; others for
fidelity, as the dog; for quickness, as the lynx; . . . eagles and
hawks for their power to fly and supply themselves with game;
the owl for its power to see in the dark. . . . They adored
the earth, as giving them its fruits; the air, for the breath of
life; the fire which warmed them and enabled them to eat
properly; the llama which supplied troops of food animals; . . .
the maize which gave them bread, and the other fruits of their
country. Those dwelling on the coast had many divinities, but
regarded the sea as the most potent of all, calling it their
mother, because of the fish which it furnished with which they
nourished their lives. All these, in general, venerated the whale
because of its hugeness; but beside this, commonly in each
province they devoted a particular cult to the fish which they
took in greatest abundance, telling a pleasant tale to the effect
that the First of all the Fish dwells in the sky, engendering
all of its species, and taking care, each season, to send them a
sufficiency of its kind for their good.” Pere Tastevin bears wit-
ness to the same belief today: “To be successful in fishing, it is
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[Prometheus]

LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

not to the fish that the Indian addresses himself, but to the
mother of the animal he would take. If he goes to fish the turtle,
he must first strike the prow of his canoe with the leaf of a small
caladium which is called yurara taya, caladium of the turtle; he
will strike in the same fashion the end of his turtle harpoon and
the point of his arrow, and often he will carry the plant in his
canoe. But let him beware lest he take the first turtle! She is
the grandmother of the others; she is of a size which confounds
the imagination, and she will drag down with her the imprudent
fisherman to the bottom of the waters, where she will give him a
fever without recovery. But if he respect her, he will be suc-
cessful in his fishing for the rest of the day.”

Universal among the tropical wild tribes is the love of dancing.
In many of the tribes the dances are mask dances, the masks
representing animals of all kinds; and the masks are frequently
regarded as sacra, and are tabu to the women. In other cases,
it is just the imitative powers of the child of nature that are
called upon, and authorities agree that the Indian can and
does imitate every kind of bird, beast, and fish with a bodily
and vocal verisimilitude that gives to these dances, where
many participate, the proper quality of a pandemonium.
Authorities disagree as to the intent of the dancing; it is obvious
to all that they are occasions of hilarity and fun; it is evident
again that they lead to excitement, and especially when ac-
companied by the characteristic potations of native liquors, to
warlike, sexual, or imaginative enthusiasm. Whether there is
conscious magic underlying them (as cannot be doubted in the
case of the similar dances of North America) is a matter of
difference of opinion, and may well be a matter of differing
fact, — the less intellectual tribes following blindly that in-
stinct for rhythm and imitation which, says Aristotle, is native
to all men, while with the others the dance has become con-
sciously ritualized. Cook says 9 of the Bororo bakororo — a
medley of hoots, squeaks, snorts, chirps, growls, and hisses,
accompanied with appropriate actions, — that it “is always
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291

sung on the vesper of a hunting expedition, and seems to be in
honor of the animal the savages intend to hunt the following
day. . . . After the singing of the bakororo that I witnessed,
all the savages went outside the great hut, where they cleared
a space of black ground, then formed animals in relief with
ashes, especially the figure of the tapir, which they purposed to
hunt the next day.” This looks like magic, — though, to be
sure, one need not press the similia similibus doctrine too far:
human beings are gifted with imagination and the power of
expressing it, and it is perhaps enough to assume that imitative
and mask dances, images like to those described, or like the
bark-cut figures and other animal signs described by von den
Steinen among the Bakairi and other tribes, are all but the
natural exteriorization of fantasy, perhaps vaguely, perhaps
vividly, coloured with anticipations of the fruits of the chase.

If anything, there seems to be a clearer magical association
in rites and games connected with plants than with those that
mimic animals. Especially is this true of the manioc, or cassava,
which is important not only as a food-giving plant, but as the
source of a liquor, and, again, is dangerous for its poison, —
which, as Teschauer remarks, must have caused the death of
many during the long period in which the use of the plant was
developed. Pere Tastevin describes men and women gathering
about a trough filled with manioc roots, each with a grater,
and as they grate rapidly and altogether, a woman strikes up
the song: “A spider has bitten me! A spider has bitten me!
From under the leaf of the kara a spider has bitten me!” The
one opposite answers: “A spider has bitten me! Bring the
cure! Quick, make haste! A spider has bitten me!” And all
break in with Yandu se suu, by which is understood nothing
more than just the rhythmic tom-tom on the grater. Similar
is the song of the sudarari — a plant whose root resembles
the manioc, which multiplies with wonderful rapidity, and
the presence of which in a manioc field is regarded as insuring
large manioc roots: “Permit, 0 patroness, that we sing during
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LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

this beautiful night!” with the refrain, “Sudarari!” This,
says Pere Tastevin, is the true symbol of the fertility of fields,
shared in a lesser way by certain other roots.

It is small wonder that the spirit or genius of the manioc fig-
ures in myth, nor is it surprising to find that the predominant
myth is based on the motive of the North American Mondamin
story. Whiffen remarks, of the north-western Amazonians:10
“What I cannot but consider the most important of their
stories are the many myths that deal with the essential
and now familiar details of everyday life in connexion with the
manihot utilissima and other fruits”; and he goes on to tell a
typical story: The Good Spirit came to earth, showed the
manioc to the Indians, and taught them to extract its evils;
but he failed to teach them how the plant might be reproduced.
Long afterward a virgin of the tribe, wandering in the woods,
was seduced by a beautiful young hunter, who was none other
than the manioc metamorphosed. A daughter born of this
union led the tribe to a fine plantation of manioc, and taught
them how to reproduce it from bits of the stalk. Since then the
people have had bread. The more elaborate version of Couto
de Magalhaes tells how a chief who was about to kill his daughter
when he found her to be with child, was warned in a dream by
a white man not to do so, for his daughter was truly innocent
and a virgin. A beautiful white boy was born to the maiden,
and received the name Mani; but at the end of a year, with no
apparent sign of ailing, he died. A strange plant grew upon his
grave, whose fruit intoxicated the birds; the Indians then
opened the grave, and in place of the body of Mani discovered
the manioc root, which is thence called Mani-oka, “House of
Mani.” Teschauer gives another version in which Mani lived
many years and taught his people many things, and at the last,
when about to die told them that after his death they should
find, when a year had passed, the greatest treasure of all, the
bread-yielding root.

It is probable that some form of the Mani myth first sug-
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293

gested to pious missionaries the extension of the legendary
journeys of Saint Thomas among the wild tribes of the tropics.
From Brazil to Peru, says Granada,11 footprints and seats of
Santo Tomas Apostol, or Santo Tome, are shown; and he associ-
ates these tales with the dissemination and cultivation of the
all-useful herb, as probably formed by a Christianizing of the
older culture myth. Three gifts are ascribed to the apostle,—
the treasure of the faith, the cultivation of the manioc, and re-
lief from epidemics. “Keep this in your houses,” quoth the
saint, “and the divine mercy will never withhold the good.”
The three gifts — a faith, a food, and a medicine, — are the
almost universal donations of Indian culture heroes, and it is
small wonder if minds piously inclined have found here a
meeting-ground of religions. An interesting suggestion made by
Sehor Lafone Quevado would make Tupan, Tupa, Tumpa,—
the widespread Brazilian name for god,—if not a derivative, at
least a cognate form of Tonapa, the culture hero of the Lake
Titicaca region, who was certainly identified as Saint Thomas
by missionaries and Christian Indians at a very early date. That
the myth itself is aboriginal there can be no manner of doubt,—
Bochica and Quetzalcoatl are northern forms of it; nor need
we doubt that Tupa or Tonapa is a native high deity — in all
probability celestial or solar, as Lafone Quevado believes.
The union of native god and Christian apostle is but the pretty
marriage of Indian and missionary faiths.

One of the most poetical of Brazilian vegetation myths is
told by Koch-Griinberg in connexion with the Yurupari festi-
val,— a mask dance {yurupari means just “mask” according
to Pere Tastevin, although some have given it the signifi-
cance of “demon”) celebrated in conjunction with the ripening
of fruits of certain palms. Women and small boys are excluded
from the fete; indeed, it is death for women even to see the
flutes and pipes, — as Humboldt said was true of the sacred
trumpet of the Orinoco Indians in his day. The legend turns
on the music of the pipes, and is truly Orphic in spirit. . . .
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LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

Many, many years ago there came from the great Water-
House, the home of the Sun, a little boy who sang with such
wondrous charm that folk came from far and near to see him
and harken. Milomaki, he was called, the Son of Milo. But
when the folk had heard him, and were returned home, and ate
of fish, they fell down and died. So their kinsfolk seized
Milomaki, and built a funeral pyre, and burnt him, because he
had brought death amongst them. But the youth went to his
death still with song on his lips, and as the flames licked about
his body, he sang: “Now I die, my son! now I leave this
world! ” And as his body began to break with the heat, still he
sang in lordly tones: “Now bursts my body! now I am dead!”
And his body was destroyed by the flames, but his soul as-
cended to heaven. From the ashes on the same day sprang a
long green blade, which grew and grew, and even in another
day had become a high tree, the first paxiuba palm. From its
wood the people made great flutes, which gave forth as won-
derful melodies as Milomaki had aforetime sung; and to this
day the men blow upon them whenever the fruits are ripe. But
women and little boys must not look upon the flutes, lest
they die. This Milomaki, say the Yahuna, is the Tupana of
the Indians, the Spirit Above, whose mask is the sky.

The region about the headwaters of the Rio Negro and the
Yapura — the scene of Koch-Grunberg’s travels — is the
centre of the highest development of the mask dances, which
seem to be recent enough with some of the tribes. In the
legends of the Kabeua it is Kuai, the mythic hero and fertility
spirit of the Arawak tribes, who is regarded as the introducer
of the mask dances, — Kuai, who came with his brethren from
their stone-houses in the hills to teach the dances to his chil-
dren, and who now lives and dances in the sky-world. This is
a myth which immediately suggests the similar tales of Zuni
and the other Pueblos, and the analogy suggested is more than
borne out by what Koch-Griinberg 12 tells of the Katcina-like
character of the masks. They all represent spirits or daemones.
 Mis
 PLATE XLI

Dance or ceremonial masks of Brazilian Indians,
now in the Peabody Museum.
 
 
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295

They are used in ceremonies in honour of the ancestral dead,
as well as in rituals addressed to nature powers. Furthermore,
the spirit or daemon is temporarily embodied in the mask, —
“the mask is for the Indian the daemon”; though, when the
mask is destroyed at the end of a ceremonial, the Daemon of
the Mask does not perish; rather he becomes maskara-anga, the
Soul of the Mask; and, now invisible, though still powerful, he
flies away to the Stone-house of the Daemones, whence only
the art of the magician may summon him. “All masks are
Daemones,” said Koch-Griinberg’s informant, “and all Dae-
mones are lords of the mask.”

III.   GODS, GHOSTS, AND BOGEYS

What are the native beliefs of the wild tribes of South
America about gods, and what is their natural religion ? If an
answer to this question may be fairly summarized from the
expressions"of observers, early and recent, it is this: The In-
dians generally believe in good powers and in evil powers, super-
human in character. The good powers are fewer and less active
than the evil; at their head is the Ancient of Heaven. Little
attention is paid to the Ancient of Heaven, or to any of the
good powers,—they are good, and do not need attention. The
evil powers are numerous and busy; the wise man must be ever
on the alert to evade them,—turn them when he can, placate
when he must.

Cardim is an early witness as to the beliefs of the Brazilian
Indians.13 “They are greatly afraid of the Devil, whom they
call Curupira, Taguain, Pigtangua, Machchera, Anhanga: and
their fear of him is so great, that only with the imagination of
him they die, as many times already it hath happened.” . . .
“They have no proper name to express God, but they say the
Tupan is the thunder and lightning, and that this is he that
gave them the mattocks and the food, and because they have
no other name more natural and proper, they call God Tupan.”
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296

Thevet says that “Toupan” is a name for the thunder or for
the Great Spirit. Keane says of the Botocudo, perhaps the low-
est of the Brazilian tribes: “The terms Yanchang, Tapan, etc.,
said to mean God, stand merely for spirit, demon, thunder, or
at the most the thunder-god.” Of these same people Ehren-
reich reports: “The conception of God is wanting; they have no
word for it. The word Tupan, appearing in some vocabularies,
is the well-known Tupi-Guaranian word, spread by missionaries
far over South America. The Botocudo understand by it, not
God, but the Christian priest himself!” Neither have they a
word for an evil principle; but they have a term for those souls
of the departed which, wandering among men at night, can do
them every imaginable ill, and “this raw animism is the only
trace of religion — if one can so call it — as yet observed
among them.” Hans Staden’s account of the religion of the
Tupinambi, among whom he fell captive, drops the scale even
lower: their god, he says, was a calabash rattle, called tam-
maraka, with which they danced; each man had his own, but
once a year the paygis, or “prophets,” pretended that a spirit
come from a far country had endowed them with the power of
conversing with all Tammarakas, and they would interpret
what these said. Women as well as men could become paygis,
through the usual Indian road to such endowment, the trance.

Similar in tenor is a recent account of the religion of the
Bororo.14 The principal element in it is the fear of evil spirits,
especially the spirits of the dead. Bope and Mareba are
the chief spirits recognized. “The missionaries spoke of the
Bororos believing in a good spirit (Mareba) who lives in the
fourth heaven, and who has a filha Mareba (son), who lives in
the first heaven, but it is apparent that the priest merely
heard the somewhat disfigured doctrines that had been learned
from some missionary” . . . But why, asks the reader, should
this conception come from the missionary rather than the
Bororo in South America, when its North American parallel
comes from the Chippewa rather than from the missionary?
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297

. . . “In reality Bope is nothing else than the Digichibi of the
Camacoco, Nenigo of the Kadioeo men, or Idmibi of the
Kadioeo women, the Ichaumra or Ighamba of the Matsi-
kui, i. e., the human soul, which is regarded as a bad spirit.
. . . The Bororo often make images of animals and Bope
out of wax. After they have been made they are beaten and
destroyed.”

Of the Camacan, a people of the southern part of Bahia, the
Abbe Ignace says that while they recognize a supreme being,
Gueggiahora, who dwells, invisible, above the stars which he
governs, yet they give him no veneration, reserving their
prayers for the crowd of spirits and bogeys — ghosts of the
dead, thunderers and storm-makers, were-beasts, and the
like, that inhabit their immediate environment, forming,
as it were, earth’s atmosphere. The Chorotes, too, believe in
good and in bad spirits, paying their respects to the latter;
while their neighbours, the Chiriguano, hold that the soul,
after death, goes to the kingdom of the Great Spirit, Tumpa,
where for a time he enjoys the pleasures of earth in a magnified
degree; but this state cannot last, and in a series of degenera-
tions the spirit returns to earth as a fox, as a rat, as a branch
of a tree, finally to fall into dissolution with the tree’s decay.
Tumpa is, (according to Pierini, the same as Tupa, the benefi-
cent supreme spirit being known by these names among the
Guarayo, although in their myths the principal personages are
the hero brothers, Abaangui and Zaguaguayu, lords of the east
and the west, and two other personages, Mbiracucha (perhaps
the same as the Peruvian Viracocha) and Candir, the last two,
like Abaangui, being shapers of lands and fathers of men.

D’Orbigny 15 describes a ritual dance of the Guarayo, men
and women together, in which hymns were addressed to
Tamoi, the Grandfather or Ancient of the Skies, who is called
upon to descend and listen. “These hymns,” he says, “are full
of naive figures and similitudes. They are accompanied by
sounding reeds, for the reason that Tamoi ascended toward the
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LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

east from the top of a bamboo, while spirits struck the earth
with its reeds. Moreover, the bamboo being one of the chief •
benefactions of Tamoi, they consider it as the intermediary
between them and the divinity.” Tamoi is besought in times of
seeding, that he may send rain to revive the thirsting earth; his
temple is a simple octagonal hut in the forest. “I have heard
them ask of nature, in a most figurative and poetic style, that it
clothe itself in magnificent vestments; of the flowers, that they
bloom*; of the birds, that they take on their richest plumage
and resume their joyous song; of the trees, that they bedeck
themselves with verdure; all to the end that these might join
with them in calling upon Tamoi, whom they never implored
in vain.”

In another connexion d’Orbigny says: “The Guarani, from
the Rio de la Plata to the Antilles and from the coasts of Brazil
to the Bolivian Andes, revere, without fearing him, a benefi-
cent being, their first father, Tamoi, or the Ancient of the
Skies, who once dwelt among them, taught them agriculture,
and afterwards disappeared toward the East, from whence he
still protects them.” Doubtless, this is too broad a generaliza-
tion, and d’Orbigny’s own reports contain numerous references
to tribes who fear the evil rather than adore the good in nature.
Nevertheless, there is not wanting evidence looking in the
other direction. One of the most recent of observers, Thomas
Whiffen, says of the northwest Brazilian tribes:16 “On the
whole their religion is a theism, inasmuch as their God has a
vague, personal, anthropomorphic existence. His habitat is
above the skies, the blue dome of heaven, which they look
upon as the roof of the world that descends on all sides in con-
tact with the earth. Yet again it is pantheism, this God being
represented in all beneficent nature; for every good thing is
imbued with his spirit, or with individual spirits subject to
him.”

According to Whiffen’s account the Boro Good Spirit, Neva
(in the same tribe Navena is the representative of all evil),
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299

once came to earth, assuming human guise. The savannahs
and other natural open places, where the sun shines freely and
the sky is open above, are the spots where he spoke to men.
But a certain Indian vexed Neva, the Good Spirit, so that he
went again to live on the roof of the world; but before he went,
he whispered to the tigers, which up to that time had hunted
with men as with brothers, to kill the Indians and their
brethren.

[Prometheus]

It is easy to see, from such a myth as this, how thin is the
line that separates good and evil in the Indian’s conception, —
indeed, how hazy is his idea of virtue. Probably the main truth
is that the Amazonian and other wild tribes generally believe in
a Tupan or Tamoi, who is on the whole beneficent, is mainly
remote and indifferent to mankind, and who, when he does
reveal himself, is most likely to assume the form of (to borrow
Whiffen’s phrase) “a tempestipresentdeity.” “Although with-
out temples, altars or idols,” says Church, of the tribes of the
Gran Chaco, “they recognize superior powers, one of whom is
supreme and thunders from the sierras and sends the rain.”
Olympian Zeus himself is the Thunderer; in Scandinavia Tiu
grows remote, and Thor with his levin is magnified. Similarly,
in North America, the Thunderbirds loom huger in men’s ima-
gination than does Father Sky. On the whole for the South
American tribes, the judgement of Couto de Magalhaes seems
sane; that the aboriginals of Brazil possessed no idea of a single
and powerful God, at the time of the discovery, and indeed
that their languages were incapable of expressing the idea; but
that they did recognize a being superior to the others, whose
name was Tupan. Observers from Acuna to Whiffen have
noted individual sceptics among the Indians; certain tribes
even (though the information is most likely from individuals)
are said to believe in no gods and no spirits; and in some
tribes the beliefs are obviously more inchoate than in others.
But in the large, the South Americans are at one with all man-
kind in their belief in a Spirit of Good, whose abode is the
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Above, and in their further belief in multitudes of dangerous
spirit neighbours sharing with them the Here.

IV.   IMPS, WERE-BEASTS, AND CANNIBALS

It would be a mistake to assume that all of these dangerous
neighbours are invariably evil, just as it is erroneous to expect
even the Ancient of the Skies to be invariably beneficent. In
Cardim’s list of the Brazilian names of the Devil he places first
the Curupira.17 But Curupira, or Korupira (as Teschauer
spells it), is nearer to the god Pan than to Satan. Korupira is a
daemon of the woods, guardian of all wild things, mischievous
and teasing even to the point of malice and harm at times, but
a giver of much good to those who approach him properly:
he knows the forest’s secrets and may be a wonderful helper to
the hunter, and he knows, too, the healing properties of herbs.
Like Pan he is not afoot like a normal man; and some say his
feet turn backward, giving a deceptive trail; some say that
his feet are double; some that he has but one rounded hoof.
He is described as a dwarf, bald and one-eyed, with huge ears,
hairy body, and blue-green teeth, and he rides a deer or a
rabbit or a pig. He insists that game animals be killed, not
merely wounded, and he may be induced to return lost cattle, —
for he is a propitiable sprite, with a fondness for tobacco. A
tale which illustrates his character, both for good and evil, is
of the unlucky hunter, whom, in return for a present of tobacco,
the Korupira helps; but the hunter must not tell his wife, and
when she, suspecting a secret, follows her husband, the Koru-
pira kills her. In another story the hunter, using the familiar
ruse of pretended self-injury by means of which Jack induces
the Giant to stab himself (an incident in which Coyote often
figures in North America), gets the Korupira to slay himself;
after a month he goes back to get the blue teeth of his victim,
but as he strikes them the Korupira comes to life. He gives the
hunter a magic bow, warning him not to use it against birds;
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the injunction is disobeyed, the hunter is torn to pieces by the
angry flocks, but the Korupira replaces the lost flesh with wax
and brings the hunter to life. Again, he warns the hunter not
to eat hot things; the latter disobeys, and forthwith melts
away.

Another “devil” mentioned by Cardim is the Anhanga.
The Anhanga is formless, and lives indeed only in thought,
especially in dreams; in reality, he is the Incubus, the Night-
mare. The Anhanga steals a child from its mother’s hammock,
and puts it on the ground beneath. The child cries, “Mother!
Mother! Beware the Anhanga which lies beneath us!” The
mother strikes, hitting the child; while the laughing Anhanga
departs, calling back, “I have fooled you! I have fooled you!”
In another tale, which recalls to us the tragedy of Pentheus and
Agave, a hunter meets a doe and a fawn in the forest. He wounds
the fawn, which calls to its mother; the mother returns, and
the hunter slays her, only to discover that it is his own mother,
whom the wicked sprite (here the Yurupari) had transformed
into a doe.

But even more to be feared than the daemones are the ghosts
and beast-embodied souls.18 Like most other peoples in a
parallel stage of mental life, the South American Indians very
generally believe in metempsychosis, souls of men returning to
earth in animal and even vegetal forms, and quite consistently
with the malevolent purpose of wreaking vengeance upon
olden foes. The belief has many characteristic modifications:
in some cases the soul does not leave the body until the flesh
is decayed; in many instances it passes for a time to a life of
joy and dancing, a kind of temporary Paradisal limbo; but
always it comes sooner or later back to fulfill its destiny as a
were-beast.19 The South American tiger, or jaguar, is naturally
the form in which the reincarnate foe is most dreaded, and no
mythic conception is wider spread in the continent than is
that of the were-jaguar, lying in wait for his human foe, —
who, if Garcilasso’s account of jaguar-worshipping tribes is
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LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

correct, offered themselves unresistingly when the beast was
encountered.

It is probable that the conception of the were-jaguar, or of
beast reincarnations, is associated in part at least with the
enigmatical question of tropical American cannibalism.20 A
recent traveller, J. D. Haseman, who visited a region of reputed
cannibalism, and found no trace of the practice, is of the opinion
that it has no present existence, if indeed it ever had any. But
against this view is the unanimous testimony of nearly all ob-
servers, with explicit descriptions of the custom, from Hans
Staden and Cardim down to Koch-Griinberg and Whiffen.
Hans Staden, who was held as a slave among the Tupinambi
of the Brazilian coast, describes a visit which he made to his
Indian master for the purpose of begging that certain prisoners
be ransomed. “He had before him a great basket of human
flesh, and was busy gnawing a bone. He put it to my mouth
and asked if I did not wish to eat. I said to him: ‘There is
hardly a wild animal that will eat its kind; how then shall I
eat human flesh?’ Then he, resuming his meal: ‘I am a tiger,
and I find it good.’” Cardim’s description of cannibal rites
is in many ways reminiscent of the Aztec sacrifice of the de-
voted youth toTezcatlipoca: the victim is painted and adorned,
is given a wife, and indeed so honoured that he does not even
seek to escape, — “for they say that it is a wretched thing to
die, and lie stinking, and eaten with worms”; throughout, the
ritual element is obvious. On the other hand, the conception of
degradation is clearly a strong factor. Whiffen makes this the
foremost reason for the practice. The Indian, he says, has very
definite notions as to the inferiority of the brute creation. To
resemble animals in any way is regarded as degrading; and this,
he regards as the reason for the widespread South American
custom of removing from the body all hair except from the
scalp, and again for the disgrace attendant upon the birth of
twins. But animals are slaughtered as food for men: what
disgrace, then to the captured enemy comparable with being
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303

used as food by his captor ? Undoubtedly, the vengeful nature
of anthropophagy is a strong factor in maintaining the custom;
from Hans Staden on, writers tell us that while the captive
takes his lot fatalistically his last words are a reminder to his
slayers that his kindred are preparing a like end for them.
Probably the unique and curious South American method of
preparing the heads of slain enemies as trophies, by a process
of removing the bones, shrinking, and decorating, is a practice
with the same end — the degradation of the enemy, — corre-
sponding, of course, to the scalping and head-taking habits of
other American tribes.

It is to be expected that with the custom of anthropophagy
widespread, it should be constantly reflected in myth. A
curious and enlightening instance is in the Bakairi hero-tale
reported by von den Steinen: 21 A jaguar married a Bakairi
maiden; while he was gone ahunting, his mother, Mero, the
mother of all the tiger kind, killed the maiden, whose twin sons
were saved from her body by a Caesarian section. The girl’s
body was then served up to the jaguar husband, without his
knowledge. When he discovered the trick — infuriated at the
trick and at having eaten his wife’s flesh, — he was about to
attack Mero: “I am thy mother!” she cried, and he desisted.
Here we have the whole moral problem of the house of Pelops
primitively adumbrated.

More in the nature of the purely ogreish is the tale related
by Couto de Magalhaes,22 the tale of Ceiuci, the Famished Old
Woman (who he says, is none other than the Pleiades). A
young man sat in a tree-rest, when Ceiuci came to the waters
beneath to fish. She saw the youth’s shadow, and cast in her
line. He laughed. She looked up. “Descend,” she cried; and
when he refused, she sent biting ants after him, compelling
him to drop into the water. Thence she snared him, and went
home with her game. While she was gone for wood to cook her
take, her daughter looked into the catch, and saw the youth,
at his request concealing him. “ Show me my game or I will
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kill you,” commanded the ogress. In company with the youth
the maiden takes flight — the “magic flight,” which figures
in many myths, South American and North. As they flee,
they drop palm branches which are transformed into animals,
and these Ceiuci stops to devour. But in time all kinds of
animals have been formed, and the girl can help the youth no
longer. “When you hear a bird singing kan kan, kan kan,
kan kan,” she says, in leaving him, “my mother is not far.”
He goes on till he hears the warning. The monkeys hide him,
and Ceiuci passes. He resumes his journey, and again hears the
warning chant. He begs the serpents to hide him; they do so,
and the ogress passes once more. But the serpents now plan to
devour the youth; he hears them laying their plot and calls
upon the macauhau, a snake-eating bird, to help him; and the
bird eats the serpents. Finally, the youth reaches a river, where
he is aided by the herons to cross. From a tree he beholds a
house, and going thither he finds an old woman complaining
that her maniocs are being stolen by the agouti. The man
tells her his story. He had started out as a youth; he is now old
and white-haired. The woman recognizes him as her son, and
she takes him in to live with her. Couto de Magalhaes sees in
this tale an image of the journey of life with its perils and its
loves; the love of man for woman is the first solace sought, but
abiding rest is found only in mother love. At least the story
will bear this interpretation; nor will it be alone as a South
American tale in which the moral meaning is conscious.

V.   SUN, MOON, AND STARS

When the Greeks began to speculate about “the thing the
Sophists call the world,” they named it sometimes the Heaven,
Ouranos, sometimes the Realm of Order, Cosmos; and the
two terms seemed to them one in meaning, for the first and
striking evidence of law and order in nature which man discov-
ers is in the regular and recurrent movements of the heavenly
 g *
 PLATE XLII

Trophy head prepared by Jivaro Indians, Ecuador,
now in the Peabody Museum. In the preparation
of such trophies the bones are carefully removed,
the head shrunken and dried, and frequently, as
in this example, ornamented with brilliant feathers.
The custom of preparing the heads of slain enemies
or of sacrificial victims as trophies was widespread
in aboriginal America, North and South, the North
American custom of scalping being probably a late
development from this earlier practice. It is pos-
sible that some at least of the masks which appear
upon mythological figures in Nasca and other repre-
sentations are meant to betoken trophy heads.
 
 
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305

bodies. But it takes a knowledge of number and a sense of
time to be able to truly discern this orderliness of the celestial
sequences; and both of these come most naturally to peoples
dwelling in zones wherein the celestial changes are reflected in
seasonal variations of vegetation and animal life. In the well-
nigh seasonless tropics, and among peoples gifted with no
powers of enumeration (for there are many South American
tribes that cannot number the ten digits), it is but natural to
expect that the cycles of the heavens should seem as lawless as
does their own instable environment, and the stars themselves
to be actuated by whims and lusts analogous to their own.

“I wander, always wander; and when I get where I want to be,
I shall not stop, but still go on. . . .”

This Song of the Turtle, of the Paumari tribes, says Steere,23
reflects their own aimless life, wandering from flat to flat of the
ever-shifting river; and it might be taken, too, as the image of
the heavenly motions, as these appear to peoples for whom
there is no art of counting. Some writers, to be sure, have
sought to asterize the greater portion of South American myth,
on the general hypothesis that sun-worship dominates the two
Americas; but this is fancy, with little warrant in the evidence.
Sun, moon, and stars, darkness and day, all find mythic ex-
pression; but there is little trace among the wild tribes of any-
thing approaching ritual devoted to these, or of aught save
mythopoesy in the thought of them.

The most rudimentary level is doubtless represented by the
Botocudo, with whom, says Ehrenreich,24 taru signifies either sun
or moon, but principally the shining vault of heaven, whether
illuminated by either of these bodies or by lightning; further,
the same word, in suitable phrase, comes to mean both wind
and weather, and even night. In contrast with this we have
the extraordinary assurance that the highly intelligent Passe
tribe believes (presumably by their own induction) that the
earth moves and the sun is stationary. The intermediate, and
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306

perhaps most truly mythic stage of speculation is represented
in the Bakairi tales told by von den Steinen, in which the sun
is placed in a pot in the moving heaven; every evening, Evaki,
the wife of the bat who is the lord of darkness, claps to the lid,
concealing the sun while the heaven returns to its former posi-
tion. Night and sleep are often personified in South American
stories, — as in the tale of the stork who tried to kill sleep, —
and here Evaki, the mistress of night, is represented as stealing
sleep from the eyes of lizards, and dividing it among all living
beings.

A charming allegory of the Amazon and its seasons is re-
corded by Barboza Rodriguez. Many years ago the Moon
would become the bride of the Sun; but when they thought to
wed, they found that this would destroy the earth: the burning
love of the Sun would consume it, the tears of the Moon would
flood it; and fire and water would mutually destroy each other,
the one extinguished, the other evaporated. Hence, they sep-
arated, going on either side. The Moon wept a day and a night,
so that her tears fell to earth and flowed down to the sea. But
the sea rose up against them, refusing to mingle the Moon’s
tears with its waters; and hence it comes that the tears still
flow, half a year outward, half a year inward. Myths of the
Pleiades are known to the Indians throughout Brazil, who re-
gard the first appearance of this constellation in the firmament
as the sign of renewing life, after the dry season,—“Mother of
the Thirsty” is one interpretation of its name. One myth tells
of an earthly hunter who pierced the sky with arrows and
climbed to heaven in quest of his beloved. Being athirst he
asked water of the Pleiades. She gave it him, saying: “Now
thou hast drunk water, thou shalt see whence I come and
whither I go. One month long I disappear and the following
month I shine again to the measure of my appointed time. All
that beholds me is renewed.” Teschauer credits many Brazil-
ian Indians with an extensive knowledge of the stars — their
course, ascension, the time of their appearance and disappear-
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307

ance, and the changes of the year that correspond, but this
seems somewhat exaggerated in view of the limited amount
of the lore cited in its support, — legends of the Pleiades
and Canopus already mentioned, and in addition only Orion,
Venus, and Sirius. Of course the Milky Way is observed, and
as in North America it is regarded as the pathway of souls.
So, in the odd Taulipang legend given by Koch-Griinberg, the
Moon, banished from its house by a magician, reflects: “ Shall I
become a tapir, a wild-pig, a beast of the chase, a bird? All
these are eaten! I will ascend to the sky! It is better there
than here; I will go there, from thencfe to light my brothers
below.” So with his two daughters he ascended the skies, and
the first daughter he sent to a heaven above the first heaven,
and the second to a third heaven; but he himself remained in
the first heaven. “I will remain here,” he said, “to shine upon
my brothers below. But ye shall illuminate the Way for the
people who die, that the soul shall not remain in darkness!”
On an analogous theme but in a vein that is indeed grim is
the Cherentes star legend reported by de Oliveira.25 The sun
is the supreme object of worship in this tribe, while the moon
and the stars, especially the Pleiades, are his cult companions.
In th$ festival of the dead there is a high pole up which the
souls of the shamans are supposed to climb to hold intercourse
with kinsfolk who are with the heavenly spheres; and it is this
pole and the beliefs which attach to it that is, doubtless, the
subject of the myth. The tale is of a young man who, as he
gazed up at the stars, was attracted by the exceptional beauty
of one of them: “What a pity that I cannot shut you up in
my gourd to admire you to my heart’s content!” he cried; and
when sleep came, he dreamed of the star. He awoke suddenly,
amazed to find standing beside him a young girl with shining
eyes: “I am the bright star you wished to keep in your gourd,”
she said; and at her insistence he put her into the gourd, whence
he could see her beautiful eyes gazing upward. After this the
young man had no rest, for he was filled with apprehension
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308

[Prometheus]

because of his supermundane guest; only at night the star would
come from her hiding-place and the young man would feast
his eyes on her beauty. But one day the star asked the young
man to go hunting, and at a palm-tree she required that he
climb and gather for her a cluster of fruit; as he did so, she
leaped upon the tree and struck it with a wand, and immedi-
ately it grew until it touched the sky, whereto she tied it by its
thick leaves and they both jumped into the sky-world. The
youth found himself in the midst of a desolate field, and the
star, commanding him not to stir, went in quest of food. Pres-
ently he seemed to hear the sound of festivity, songs and dances,
but the star, returning, bade him above all not to go to see the
dancing. Nevertheless, when she was gone again, the youth
could not repress his curiosity and he went toward the sound.
. . . “What he saw was fearful! It was a new sort of dance of
the dead! A crowd of skeletons whirled around, weird and
shapeless, their putrid flesh hanging from their bones and their
eyes dried up in their sunken orbits. The air was heavy with
their foul odour.” The young man ran away in horror. On his
way he met the star who blamed him for his disobedience and
made him take a bath to cleanse him of the pollution. But he
could no longer endure the sky-world, but ran to the spot where
the leaves were tied to the sky and jumped on to the palm-tree,
which immediately began to shrink back toward the earth:
“You run away in vain, you shall soon return,” the star called
after him; and so indeed it was, for he had barely time to tell
his kindred of his adventure before he died. And “thus it was
known among the Indians that no heaven of delight awaits
them above, even though the stars shine and charm us.”

The uniting of heaven and earth by a tree or rock which
grows from the lower to the upper world is found in many forms,
and is usually associated with cosmogonic myths (true crea-
tion stories are not common in Brazil). Such a story is the
Mundurucu tale, reported by Teschauer,26 which begins with
a chaotic darkness from which came two men, Karusakahiby,
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309

and his son, Rairu. Rairu stumbled on a bowl-shaped stone;
the father commanded him to carry it; he put it upon his head,
and immediately it began to grow. It grew until it formed the
heavens, wherein the sun appeared and began to shine. Rairu,
recognizing his father as the heaven-maker, knelt before him;
but Karu was angry because the son knew more than did he.
Rairu was compelled to hide in the earth. The father found
him and was about to strike him, but Rairu said: “Strike me
not, for in the hollow of the earth I have found people, who will
come forth and labour for us.” So the First People were allowed
to issue forth, and were separated into their tribes and kinds
according to colour and beauty. The lazy ones were trans-
formed into birds, bats, pigs, and butterflies. A somewhat
similar Kaduveo genesis, narrated by Fric, tells how the various
tribes of men were led from the underground world and suc-
cessively assigned their several possessions; last of all came the
Kaduveo, but there were no more possessions to distribute;
accordingly to them was assigned the right to war upon the
other Indians and to steal their lands, wives, and children.

The Mundurucu genesis opens: “In the beginning the world
lay in darkness.” In an opposite and indeed very unusual way
begins the cosmogonic myth recorded by Couto de Magalhaes :27
“In the beginning there was no night; the day was unbroken.
Night slept at the bottom of the waters. There were no animals,
but all things could speak.” It is said, proceeds the tale, that
at this time the daughter of the Great Serpent married a youth
who had three faithful servants. One day he said to these serv-
ants: “Begone! My wife desires no longer to lie with me.”
The servants departed, and the husband called upon his wife
to lie with him. She replied: “It is not yet night.” He an-
swered: “There is no night; day is without end.” She: “My
father owns the night. If you wish to lie with me, seek it at
the river’s source.” So he called his three servants, and the
wife dispatched them to secure a nut of the tucuma (a palm of
bright orange colour, important to the Indians as a food and
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LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

industrial plant). When they reached the Great Serpent he
gave them the nut, tightly sealed: “Take it. Depart. But if
you open it, you are lost.” They set out in their canoe, but
presently heard from within the nut: “Ten ten ten, ten ten ten.”
It was the noise of the insects of the night. “What is this
noise? Let us see,” said one. The leader answered: “No; we
will be lost. Make haste.” But the noise continued and finally
all drew together in the canoe, and with fire melted the sealing
of the fruit. The imprisoned night streamed forth! The leader
cried: “We are lost! Our mistress already knows that we have
freed the night!” At the same time the mistress, in her house,
said to her husband: “They have loosed the night. Let us
await the day.” Then all things in the forests metamorphosed
themselves into animals and birds; all things in the waters
became water-fowl and fishes; and even the fisherman in his
canoe was transformed into a duck, his head into the duck’s
head, his paddle into its web feet, his boat into its body.
When the daughter of the Great Serpent saw Venus rise, she
said: “The dawn is come. I shall divide day from night.”
Then she unravelled a thread, saying: “Thou shalt be cubuju
[a kind of pheasant]; thou shalt sing as dawn breaks.” She
whitened its head and reddened its feathers, saying: “Thou
shalt sing always at dawn of day.” Then she unravelled another
thread, saying: “Thou shalt be inambu” [a perdrix that sings
at certain hours of the night]; and powdering it with cinders:
“Thou shalt sing at eve, at midnight, and at early morn.”
From that time forth the birds sang at the time appropriate to
them, in day or night. But when the three servants returned,
their mistress said to them: “Ye have been unfaithful. Ye have
loosed the night. Ye have caused the loss of all. For this ye
shall become monkeys, and swing among the branches for all
time.”
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3ii

VI.   FIRE, FLOOD, AND TRANSFORMATIONS

Purchas’s translation of Cardim begins:28 “It seemeth that
this people had no knowledge of the beginning and creation of
the world, but of the deluge it seemeth they have some notice:
but as they have no writings nor characters such notice is ob-
scure and confused; for they say that the waters drowned all
men, and that one only escaped upon a Janipata with a sister
of his that was with child and that from these two they have
their beginning and from thence began their multiplying and
increase.”

This is a fair characterization of the general cosmogonical
ideas of the South American wild tribes. There is seldom any
notion of creation; there is universally, it would seem, some
legend of a cataclysm, or series of them, fire and flood, offering
such general analogies to the Noachian story as naturally to
suggest to men unacquainted with comparative mythology
the inference that the tale of Noah was indeed the source of all.
Following the deluge or conflagration there is a series of inci-
dents which might be regarded as dispersal stories, — tales of
transformations and migrations by means of which the tribes
of animals and men came to assume their present form. Very
generally, too, the Transformer-Heroes are the divine pair,
sometimes father and son, but commonly twin brothers, who
give the animals their lasting forms, instruct men in the arts,
and after Herculean labors depart, the one to become lord of
the east and the day, the other lord of the west and the night,
the one lord of life, the other lord of death and the ghost-
world. It is not unnatural to see in this hero pair the sun and
the moon, as some authorities do, though it would surely be a
mistake to read into the Indian’s thought the simple identifi-
cation which such a statement implies: a tale is first of all a
tale, with the primitive man; and if it have an allegorical
meaning this is rarely one which his language can express in
other terms than the tale itself.
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One of the best known of the South American deluge stories
is the Caingang legend 29 which the native narrator had heard
“from the mother of the mother of his mother, who had heard
it in her day from her ancient progenitors.” The story is the
common one of people fleeing before the flood to a hill and cling-
ing to the branches of a tree while they await the subsidence
of the waters, — an incident of a kind which may be common
enough in flood seasons, and which might be taken as a mere
reflection of ordinary experience but for the fact of the series
of transformations which follow the return to dry land; and
these include not only the formation of the animal kinds, but
the gift of song from a singing gourd and a curious process of
divination, taught by the ant-eater, by means of which the sex
of children is foretold.

The flood is only one incident in a much more comprehen-
sive cycle of events, assembled variously by various peoples,
but having such a family likeness that one may without im-
propriety regard the group as the tropical American Genesis.
Of this cycle the fullest versions are those of the Yuracare, as
reported by d’Orbigny, and of the' Bakairi, as reported by von
den Steinen.30

In the Bakairi tale the action begins in the sky-world. A cer-
tain hunter encountered Oka, the jaguar, and agreed to make
wives for Oka if the latter would spare him. He made two
wives out of wood, blowing upon them. One of these wives
swallowed two finger-bones, and became with child. Mero,
the mother of Oka and of the jaguar kind, slew the woman, but
Kuara, the brother of Oka, performed the Caesarian operation
and saved the twins, who were within her body. These twins
were the heroes, Keri and Kame. To avenge their mother
they started a conflagration which destroyed Mero, them-
selves hiding in a burrow in the earth. Kame came forth too
soon and was burned, but Keri blew upon his ashes and restored
him to life. Keri in his turn was burned and restored by Kame.
First, in their resurrected lives did these two assume human
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form. Now begins the cycle of their labours. They stole the sun
and the moon from the red and the white vultures, and gave
order to their way in the heavens, keeping them in pots, cover-
able, when the light of these bodies should be concealed: sun,
moon, and ruddy dawn were all regarded as made of feathers.
Next, heaven and earth, which were as yet close together, were
separated. Keri said to the heavens: “Thou shalt not remain
here. My people are dying. I wish not that my people die.”
The heavens answered: “I will remain here!” “We shall ex-
change places,” said Keri; whereupon he came to earth and the
sky rose to where it now is. The theft of fire from the fox, who
kept it in his eye; the stealing of water from the Great Serpent,
with the formation of rivers; the swallowing of Kame by a water
monster, and his revivescence by Keri; the institution of the
arts of house-building, fishery, dancing; and the separation of
human kinds; — all these are incidents leading up to the final
departure of Keri and Kami, who at the last ascend a hill, and
go thence on their separate ways. “Whither are they gone?
Who knows ? Our ancestors knew not whither they went. To-
day no one knows where they are.”

The Bakairi dwell in the central regions of Brazil; the Yura-
care are across the continent, near the base of the Andes. From
them d’Orbigny obtained a version of the same cosmogony,
but fuller and with more incidents. The world began with
sombre forests, inhabited by the Yuracare. Then came Sara-
ruma and burned the whole country. One man only escaped,
he having constructed an underground refuge. After the con-
flagration he was wandering sadly through the ruined world
when he met Sararuma. “Although I am the cause of this ill,
yet I have pity on you,” said the latter, and he gave him a
handful of seeds from whose planting sprang, as by magic, a
magnificent forest. A wife appeared, as it were ex nihilo, and
bore sons and a daughter to this man. One day the maiden
encountered a beautiful tree with purple flowers, called Ule.
Were it but a man, how she would love it! And she painted
 3 H

LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

and adorned the tree in her devotion, with sighs and hopes, —
hopes that were not in vain, for the tree became a beautiful
youth. Though at first she had to bind him to keep him from
wandering away, the two became happy spouses. But one
day Ule, hunting with his brothers, was slain by a jaguar. His
bride, in her grief like Isis, gathered together the morsels of his
torn body. Again, her love was rewarded and Ule was restored
to life, but as they journeyed he glanced in a pool, saw a dis-
figured face, where a bit of flesh had not been recovered, and
despite the bride’s tears took his departure, telling her not to
look behind, no matter what noise she heard. But she was
startled into doing this, became lost, and wandered into a
jaguar’s lair. The mother of the jaguars took pity upon her,
but her four sons were for killing her. To test her obedience
they commanded her to eat the poisonous ants that infested
their bodies; she deceived three of them by substituting seeds
for the ants, which she cast to the ground; but the fourth had
eyes in the back of his head, detected the ruse and killed her.
From her body was tom the child which she was carrying, Tiri,
who was raised in secret by the jaguar mother.

When Tiri was grown he one day wounded a paca, which
said: “You live in peace with the murderers of your mother,
but me, who have done you no harm, you wish to kill.” Tiri
demanded the meaning of this, and the paca told him the tale.
Tiri then lay in wait for the jaguar brothers, slaying the first
three with arrows, but the jaguar with eyes in the back of his
head, climbed into a tree, calling upon the trees, the sun, stars,
and moon to save him. The moon snatched him up, and since
that time he can be seen upon her bosom, while all jaguars love
the night. Tiri, who was the master of all nature, taught culti-
vation to his foster-mother, who now had no sons to hunt
for her. He longed for a companion, and created Caru, to be his
brother, from his own finger-nail; and the two lived in great
amity, performing many deeds. Once, invited to a feast, they
spilled a vase of liquor which flooded the whole earth and
 THE AMAZON AND BRAZIL

3i5

drowned Caru; but when the waters were subsided, Tiri found
his brother’s bones and revived him. The brothers then married
birds, by whom they had children. The son of Caru died and
was buried. Tiri then told Caru at the end of a certain time
to go seek his son, who would be revived, but to be careful not
to eat him. Caru, finding a manioc plant on the grave, ate of it.
Immediately a great noise was heard, and Tiri said: “Caru has
disobeyed and eaten his son; in punishment he and all men shall
be mortal, and subject to all toils and all sufferings.”

In following adventures the usual transformations take place,
and mankind, in their tribes, are led forth from a great rock,
Tiri saying to them: “Ye must divide and people all the earth,
and. that ye shall do so I create discord and make you enemies
of one another.” Thus arose the hostility of tribes. Tiri now
decided to depart, and he sent birds in the several directions to
discover in which the earth extends farthest. Those sent to the
east and the north speedily returned, but the bird sent toward
the setting sun was gone a long time, and when at last it re-
turned it brought with it beautiful feathers. So Tiri departed
into the West, and disappeared.
 CHAPTER X

THE PAMPAS TO THE LAND OF FIRE

I.   THE FAR SOUTH1

THE Rio de la Plata is the third of the great river systems
which drain the South American continent. It combines
the waters of the Uruguay, draining the hilly region of southern
Brazil, with those of the Parana, which through its numerous
tributaries taps the heart of the south central portion of the
continent. The Parana and its continuation, the Paraguay,
flowing almost due south from the centre of the continent, form
a kind of axis, dividing the hilly lands on the east from the
great woodland plains known as the Chaco, stretching west-
ward to the Andes, from whose age-worn detritus they were
doubtless formed. The northern boundary of the Chaco is in
the neighbourhood of the Tropic of Capricorn; southward the
plains extend far into Argentina, narrowing with the encroach-
ing mountains, and finally giving way to the grassy pampas,
in the latitude of Buenos Aires. These, in turn, extend south-
ward to the Patagonian plains — geologically one of earth’s
youngest regions, — of which the terminus is the mountain
region meeting the southern straits. Parallel with this stretch
of open country, which diminishes in width as the southern
latitudes are approached, is the Andean ridge, almost due
north and south in sense, scarcely varying the width of the
western coastal region which it marks off, but eastward extend-
ing in heavier lines of ridges and broader plateaus as the centre
of the continent is approached. South of latitude 40° the
western coastal region, with the sinking of the Andean range,
merges in a long archipelago leading on to Tierra del Fuego and
 THE PAMPAS TO THE LAND OF FIRE 317

its satellite islands, beyond the Straits of Magellan, — an ar-
chipelago which is the far southern counterpart of that reaching
along North America from Puget Sound to the Aleutian Isles.

The aboriginal peoples of the region thus described fall into
a number of groups of exceptional interest to the ethnologist.
In the Chaco, to the north, are to be found, to this day, tribes
practically untouched by the influence of civilization — tribes
in the state which for untold centuries must have been that
of the peoples of central South America. Some of them show
signs of having been under the influence of the cultured peoples
of the Andean regions, preserving in their fabrics, for example,
figured designs strikingly like those of Incaic Peru. It has even
been suggested that the region is in no small part peopled by
descendants of Indians who in former times fled from the west,
first before the armies of the Incas, later before the advance
of Spanish power.

This constant pressure, which can in a measure be followed in
historic times, has had its effect in pushing southward peoples
whose origin must be sought in the central region. Such a
people are the Abipone — a group of tribes which owe their
especial fame among South American Indians perhaps more
to the fact that they were so faithfully pictured by Father
Dobrizhoffer, during the period in which they were gathered in
missions, than to their own qualities, striking as these are.
In any case, the Abipone, who in the eighteenth century had
become an equestrian people of the open country, had, ac-
cording to their own tradition, moved southward out of the
forests, bearing with them many of the traits still to be found
among the tribes of the Chaco.

[Prometheus]

The Calchaqui civilization, of the Andean region just north
of latitude 30° was one of the latest conquests of the Inca
power, and represents its southerly extension. The actual
dividing line, as recorded by Garcilasso, was the river Rapel,
latitude 340, where, according to the historian, the Inca Tupac
Yupanqui was held in his southward advance by the Arau-
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318

canian (or Aucanian) tribes who formed the population of
Chile and west central Argentina. The Araucanians enjoy the
proud distinction of being to this day an unconquered people;
for they held their own in long and bloody wars with the Span-
iards, as before they had held against the aggressive Incas.
Further, in their general culture, and in intellectual vigor, they
stand at the head of the peoples of southerly South America.

Scarcely less in romantic interest is the group of peoples —
the Puelche and Tehuelche tribal stocks — forming the Pata-
gonian race, whose tall stature, exaggerated in the imagination
of early discoverers, made of them a race of giants. Like the
Pampean tribes they early become horsemen, expert with the
bolas; and with no permanent villages and no agriculture, they
remain equestrian nomads of the southern plains. The Ona
of Tierra del Fuego represent a non-equestrian as they are also
a non-canoe-using branch of the Patagonian race. Altogether
different are the canoe peoples of the southern archipelago,
the Alakaluf and the Yahgan. These have shared with the
Australian Blacks, with the Botocudo, and with one or two
other groups of human beings, the reputation of representing
the lowest grade of human intelligence and attainment. They
were long thought to be hopelessly imbruted, though this
judgement is being somewhat revised in the face of the achieve-
ments of missionary workers among them. Still there are few
more striking contrasts in the field of ethnology than is that
between the culture of the peoples of the Pacific archipelago
of the northern America, with their elaborate society, art, and
mythology, and the mentally deficient and culturally destitute
savages of the island region of austral America.

II. EL CHACO AND THE PAMPEANS

In d’Orbigny’s classification the Pampean race is divided
into three groups. Of these the most northerly is the Moxean,
comprising tribes about the headwaters of the Madeira. Next
 THE PAMPAS TO THE LAND OF FIRE 319

southward is the Chiquitean branch, with their centre on the
divide between the headwaters of the Madeira and those of the
southward flowing Paraguay and Pilcomayo rivers; hence
marking the division of the Amazonian and La Plata systems.
Still south of these is the main Pampean branch, its northerly
reach being represented by the Toba, Lengua, and other Chaco
stocks; its centre by the Mocobi, Abipone, and the Charrua
of Uruguay (whom other authorities ally with the Brazilian
stocks); its southerly division comprising the Puelche and the
Tehuelche, or Patagonians proper. So far as the Pampean
branch is concerned, this grouping corresponds with ideas still
received.

D’Orbigny gives scant materials as to the mythic beliefs of
the Indians of the Pampean tribes, yet some are of more than
ordinary interest. Thus, of the Mataguaya, he says 2 that they
regard eclipses as due to a great bird, with spread wings, assail-
ing the star eclipsed, — which is in harmony with widespread
South American notions; so, for example, in the Chiquitean
idea, recorded by Father Fernandez, the eclipsed moon is
darkened by its own blood drawn by savage dogs. Still more
interesting is the statement, drawn from Guevara’s Historia
del Paraguay, that the Mocobi regard the Southern Cross as
the image of a rhea pursued by dogs. This is the very form in
which the Great Wain is interpreted in North America; as far
as north Greenland it is regarded as a bear or deer pursued by
dogs or by hunters. Fragments of a Mocobi cosmic myth are
also given: The Sun is a man, the Moon is a woman. Once,
long ago, the Sun fell from the sky. The Mocobi raised it and
placed it again in the sky, but it fell a second time and burned
all the forests. The Mocobi saved themselves by changing
themselves into caymans and other amphibians. A man and a
woman climbed a tree to save themselves, a flame singed their
faces, and they were changed into apes. . . . This tale is
obviously related to the hero cycle of which the Bakairi and
Yuracare stories are versions.
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LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

But among the Indians of this region it is of the Abipone,
neighbours of the Mocobi, that our knowledge is fullest, owing
to the classical narrative of Martin Dobrizhoffer 3 who, in the
eighteenth century, was for eighteen years a Jesuit missionary
in Paraguay. In general Dobrizhoffer’s account of the Abipone
corresponds so closely with what is now familiar knowledge
of Indian ideas — animism, shamanism, necromancy, and in
their own region belief in were-jaguars and the like, — that
it is valuable rather for verification than interpretation. In
the field of religion, the Father is interested in superstitions
rather than in myth, of which he gives little. His comments,
however, have a quality of personality that imparts an entirely
dramatic verve to his narrative of the encounter of the two
minds — Jesuit and savage.

“Haec est summa delicti, nolle recognoscere quem ignorare non
possit, are the words of Tertullian, in his Apology for the Chris-
tians. Theologians agree in denying that any man in possession
of his reason can, without a crime, remain ignorant of God for
any length of time. This opinion I warmly defended in the
University of Cordoba, where I finished the four years’ course
of theology begun at Gratz in Styria. But what was my as-
tonishment, when on removing from thence to a colony of
Abipones, I found that the whole language of these savages does
not contain a single word which expresses God or a divinity.
To instruct them in religion, it was necessary to borrow the
Spanish word for God, and insert into the catechism Dios ecnarn
coagarik, God the creator of things.” He goes on to tell how,
camped in the open with a party of Indians, the serene sky
delighting the eyes with its twinkling stars, he began a conver-
sation with the Cacique Ychoalay: “Do you behold the splen-
dour of the Heaven, with its magnificent arrangement of stars?
Who can suppose that all this is produced by chance ? . . . Who
can be mad enough to imagine that all these beauties of the
Heavens are the effect of chance, and that the revolutions and
vicissitudes of the celestial bodies are regulated without the
 THE PAMPAS TO THE LAND OF FIRE 321

direction of an omniscient mind? Whom do you believe to be
their creator and governor?” “My father,” replied Ychoalay,
“our grandfathers and great-grandfathers were wont to con-
template the earth alone, solicitous only to see whether the
plain afforded grass and water for their horses. They never
troubled themselves about what went on in the Heavens, and
who was the creator and governor of the stars.”

Such incomprehension of things theological seemed to the
missionaries to argue a sub-human nature in the Indians, and
Dobrizhoffer, after remarking that Paul III was obliged to
issue a bull in which he pronounced Indians to be really men,
capable of understanding the Catholic faith and of receiving its
sacraments, goes on himself to argue that they are in fact in-
telligent human beings in spite of this incredible density. And
then he continues: “I said that the Abipones were commend-
able for their wit and strength of mind; but ashamed of my
too hasty praise, I retract my words and pronounce them fools,
idiots, and madmen. Lo! this is the proof of their insanity!
They are unacquainted with God, and with the very name of
God, yet they affectionately salute the evil spirit, whom they
call Aharaigichi, or Queevet, with the title of grandfather,
Groaperikie. Him they declare to be their grandfather, and
that of the Spaniards, but with this difference, that to the
latter he gives gold and silver and line clothes, but to them he
transmits valour.” Here the lips of the reader begin to flicker
with amusement, —- it is easy to see the devil under the mask
of strange gods! Father Dobrizhoffer continues: “The Abipones
think the Pleiades to be the representation of their grandfather;
and as that constellation disappears at certain periods from the
sky of South America, upon such occasions, they suppose that
their grandfather is sick, and are under a yearly apprehension
that he is going to die: but as soon as those seven stars are
again visible in the month of May, they welcome their grand-
father, as if returned and restored from sickness, with joyful
shouts, and the festive sound of pipes and trumpets, congratu-
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LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

lating him on the recovery of his health. ‘What thanks do we
owe thee! and art thou returned at last? Ah! thou hast happily
recovered!’ With such exclamations, expressive of their joy
and folly, do they fill the air.”

Dobrizhoffer devotes a learned and amusing chapter to “Con-
jectures why the Abipones take the Evil Spirit for their Grand-
father and the Pleiades for the representation of him”; in which,
finding no Scriptural explanation, he concludes that the cult
came ultimately from Peru (the Peruvian’s knowledge of God
did not come along with it because “vice is more easily learnt
than virtue”). As a matter of fact the Pleiades cult extends
throughout Brazil, its seasonal reappearance being the occasion,
as Dobrizhoffer narrates, of a great feast of intoxication and
joy, a veritable Dionysia. And it is hardly to be doubted that
the Abipone, as their own traditions indicate, came from the
north, probably from the Chaco. It is to a contemporary mis-
sionary, Barbrooke Grubb, who has spent an even longer time
in the Chaco than did the Jesuit among the Abipone, that we
owe the completer interpretation of the ideas which Dobriz-
hoffer sketched. The Chaco Indians are as near untouched
savages as any people on the globe, so that their beliefs are
essentially uncontaminated.

The mythology of the Chaco tribes, says Grubb,4 is founded
on the idea of a Creator, symbolized by the beetle. First, the
material universe was made; then the Beetle-Creator sent
forth from its hole in the earth a race of First Beings, who for a
time ruled all. Afterward the Beetle formed a man and a
woman from the clay which it threw up from its hole, the two
being joined like the Siamese twins. They were persecuted by
the beings who preceded them, whereupon the Beetle separated
them and endowed them with the power of reproduction,
whence the world was peopled and came to its present state.

Whether or no the First Beings, hostile to man, are to be
identified with the Kilyikhama, a class of nature daemones,
Grubb does not make clear. He does, however, describe
 THE PAMPAS TO THE LAND OF FIRE 323

numerous of these daemonic forms, — the white Kilyikhama,
heard whistling in his little craft on the swampy waters; the boy
Kilyikhama with lights on each side of his head, the thieving
Kilyikhama; and most dreaded of all the daemon, immensely
tall and extremely thin, with eyes like balls of fire, whose ap-
pearance presages instant death. In addition to these daemones,
Aphangak, ghosts of men, are intensely feared, and there are
ghosts of animals, too, to be dreaded, — though, curiously,
none of fish or serpents. The Milky Way is supposed to be the
path of the Kilyikhama, some of whom, in the form of large
white birds, are believed there to await their opportunity to
descend into the bodies of men. A very curious burial custom
is also associated with the Galaxy: when a person is laid out
(sometimes even before the dying has breathed his last) an
incision is made in the side of the body and heated stones are
inserted; these stones are supposed to ascend into the Milky
Way whence they await their opportunity to fall upon the
person (wizard or other) who has caused the death. “Conse-
quently the Indians are very frightened when they see a falling
star.” Whirlwinds are believed to be the passing of spirits,
and the whole realm of the meteorological is full of portents,—
the rainbow, oddly enough, conceived as a serpentine monster,
being a sign of calamity rather than an arc of hope.

Of the Pleiades Grubb says that they are known by two
names—Mounting-in-the-South and Holders-Together. “Their
rising is connected with the beginning of spring, and feasts
are held at this time, generally of a markedly immoral
character.” That they call the constellation Aksak, Grand-
father, is not, in the missionary’s opinion, due to the fact that
it is the image or embodiment of the devil (as Dobrizhoffer
supposed of the similar Abiponean custom). Aksak is rather a
term applied to any person or thing whose nature is not quite
understood or with whom power and authority rest: “what is
most important of all, they term the creator beetle aksak.”
Grubb concludes: “In my opinion, the statement of Dobriz-
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LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

hoffer that the Abipones looked upon themselves as descend-
ants, or, it may be, the creation of their ‘grandfather the devil,’
is nothing more nor less than the widespread tradition that
man was created by the beetle, and, therefore, their originator,
instead of being a devil, was rather a creating god.” Perhaps,
after all, Tertullian is right.

The missionary also speaks of “a remarkable theory” held
by the Indians, that among the stars there are countries similar
to their own, with forests and lakes, which he would explain
either as tales of the mirage or as due to “ a childlike notion that
the sky is solid.” The “childlike notion” is, of course, but
another instance of a conception that prevails among the
native tribes of the two Americas, as far as north Greenland;
and along with this notion is that of an underworld to which
ghosts descend, which he elsewhere mentions as characteristic
of the Chaco, — though his account of their varying ideas as
to the habitations of the dead shows well enough that these
savage theorists are as uncertain in their location of the abode
of shades as was Homer himself.

III.   THE ARAUCANIANS

The Araucanian, or Auca, tribes — of which the Mapuche,
Pehuenche, and Huiliche are the more important divisions,
while the southerly Chono and Chiloe are remote branches —
are the aborigines of the southern Andean region, inhabiting
both slopes of the mountains, extending to the sea on the
Pacific side and out into the Patagonian plains on the Atlantic
side. Of all the extreme austral Indians they represent from
pre-Columbian times the highest culture, though it is evident
that the process of acculturation was recent when the whites
first appeared, resulting from contact with Inca and Cal-
chaqui civilizations. The whole group of Araucanians proper
was organized into a confederacy, with four principal divisions,
uniting for common defence, — an organization very similar
 THE PAMPAS TO THE LAND OF FIRE 325

to that of the Iroquois Confederacy in North America, and
equally effective; for the Araucanians not only put a stop to
the southerly aggressions of the Incas, but they also successfully
resisted the Spaniards, establishing for themselves a unique
place in the history of American aborigines in contact with the
white race. In manner of life the Araucanians were originally
little if any in advance of their Patagonian neighbours; but as
a result of their contact with the northerly Andean peoples,
their own northern branches had acquired, when the Spaniards
first came, a rudimentary agriculture, the potter’s and the
weaver’s arts, some skill with gold and silver, and the habit of
domesticating the guanaco, — and this culture was gradually
extending to the south. As a whole, however, Araucanian
culture represents a sharp descent, marked by the boundaries
of the Incaic empire.

The romantic history of the Araucanians, and especially
their heroic wars with the Spaniards, have naturally attracted
to them an unusual measure of historical and anthropological
investigation, so the literature is copious. Molina’s History,
written in the middle of the eighteenth century, is the best-
known work in the field, and is, in a sense, the classic exposition
of Araucanian institutions, though both for extent and ac-
curacy it has been superseded by later works, pre-eminently
those of Jose Medina and Tomas Guevara.5 The first volume
of the latter’s great Historia de la Civilization de Araucania is
devoted to “Antropolojia Araucana,” and in it is given a
summary of the native pantheon.

First of the gods is Pillan, often regarded as the Araucanian
equivalent of the Tupan of the forest regions of Brazil, god of
thunder and spirit of fire. “This conception represents a sur-
vival of the prehistoric idea which considers fire as the life-
principle, carried to the point of adoring it as an invisible and
personal power . . . forces of nature, such as this, being per-
sonified in the mind of the barbarian.” Pillan, however, while
a personal, is also a collective power: caciques at their death
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326

and warriors who fall in battle pass into the category of Pilli,
some being converted into volcanic forces, others ascending to
the clouds. “From this source,” says Guevara, “is due the
belief, conserved almost to this time, that a tempest is a battle
between their ancestors and their enemies, and the custom of
encouraging their own and imprecating the others according
to the turn of the battle: if the clouds move toward the south
victory pertains to those of their race; if to the north — the
country of the Spaniards — they suppose the latter to be
victorious.” . . . Inevitably one recalls the bodeful thunder-
storm in Julius Caesar, —

“Fierce fiery warriors fought upon the clouds,

In ranks and squadrons and right form of war,

Which drizzled blood upon the Capitol;

The noise of battle hurtled in the air,

Horses did neigh, and dying men did groan,

And ghosts did shriek and squeal about the streets.”

Pillan, as the supreme god of a warlike people, was naturally
regarded as the god of war. “They made his habitation,” says
our author, “in all those parts whence breaks the thunder: on
the crest of high mountains, in the clouds, and in the volcanoes,
whose eruptions are so often accompanied by electrical phe-
nomena.” The deity’s name is, as a matter of fact, preserved
in the names of various peaks.

Molina6 states that the word Pillan is derived from pilli,
meaning “soul,” and that the god has various attributive de-
signations, such as Spirit-of-Heaven (Guenu-pillan), the Great
Being, the Thunderer; and along with these, suspiciously
European, such epithets as the Creator, the Omnipotent, the
Eternal. On the whole, it is not unreasonable to assume that
the true aboriginal meaning of the word is “ mysterious
power ” and that the idea itself belongs with the group of
conceptions of a semi-pantheistic nature power, of which
Wakanda and Manito are the best-known names.

That Pillan stands at the head of a hierarchy of nature

[Prometheus]

 THE PAMPAS TO THE LAND OF FIRE 327

powers is the unanimous testimony of authorities. Molina
believes that the government of Pillan is modelled on that of
the Araucanian confederacy. He is the great chief of the in-
visible world, having under him his high-chiefs and under-
chiefs to conduct cosmic affairs. As with most primitive folk,
the great majority of these lesser deities are considered as
malignant, or at least as dangerous, rather than as beneficent
powers. The Huecuvu (Guecubu, in Molina) are a group of
daemones capable of assuming animal and human forms. The
Indians “attribute natural phenomena to the implacable
hatred of these agents of Pillan. They sow the fields with
caterpillars, weaken animals with disease, quake the earth, and
devour the fish in rivers and lakes. The Huecuvu corresponds
with great exactness to the idea of demon.” Evil also is Epuna-
mun (whom Molina regarded as a war-god, apparently on the
strength of the Padre Olivares’s statement that he presided
at councils of war, where “though they have no confidence in
his councils, they frequently follow them, rather than offend
through disobedience”). Epunamun is represented as having
deformed legs, and he probably belongs to that extraordinary
group of South American monster-bogeys having feet reversed
or knees that bend backward. The Cherruve are the spirits
or senders of shooting-stars and comets, figured (quite to the
taste of the Mediaeval European) as man-headed serpents.
Similar is the Ihuaivilu, a seven-headed fire-monster, inhabiting
volcanic neighbourhoods. Meulen appears to be anything
but the benevolent deity that Molina deemed it; he is the
spirit of the whirlwind, disappearing in the ground in the form
of a lizard when the whirlwind is dissipated; in modern folklore
he appears as El Destolanado, devouring all children who cross
his path.

The category of demonic beings is by no means exhausted
with these wind and fire powers. The old Chilean mythic lore
is filled with composite and metamorphosing beast-bogeys and
witch-beings, many of which have been handed on to the mod-
 328 LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

ern peasantry; so that it is now often impossible to tell what
elements are native and what communicated. Many still bear
native names. Perimontum is a phantom appearing from the
other world to announce some extraordinary event. The Am is
the ghost of a murdered man; the Alhue is a mischievous sprite
whose sport is to frighten men. Colocolo is a small, invisible
or subterranean animal or bird, whose cry, colo colol is some-
times heard; anyone drinking its saliva will die. Neguruvilu, or
Guirivilo, is a cat-like monster armed with a claw-pointed tail;
it lives in the depths of the waters, whence it sallies forth to kill
men and animals, assuming a serpentine form as it envelops
them. There are numerous other water-monsters, some marine,
some amphibians, their most various forms being naturally
found among the Chiletes of the southern archipelago. El
Caleuche, the witch-boat, is interesting for the fact that here,
in the far Pacific south, it represents what might almost be
called an outcropping of the similar conceptions found among
the Eskimo and the pelagic tribes of the North-West Coast.
The witch-boat is seen at night, illuminated, and it carries
fishermen down to the treasure-houses at the bottom of the
sea. Another monster of this region is Camahueto, capable of
wrecking large boats; while Cuero, known to the Araucanians
as Trelquehuecuve, is a sort of huge octopus, whose arms end
in claws and whose ears are covered with eyes; it has great pow-
ers of dilation and contraction, and seizes and slays all that fall
within its reach; when it goes ashore to sun itself and wishes
to return to its element, it raises a gale which pushes it into
the water. Huaillepen, or Guallipen, is in the form of a calf-
headed sheep, with deformed legs; it issues from streams and
pools on misty mornings and frightens pregnant women, caus-
ing their children to be born deformed. The Imbunche are
monsters into which babes stolen by witches have been trans-
formed; the Trauco is an old witch appearing in the form of
a child and having the habits of an incubus; the Pihuichen, or
Piguchen, is a vampire-like serpent that can transform itself
 THE PAMPAS TO THE LAND OF FIRE 329

into a frog, a blood-sucker and death-bringer, while the Chon-
chon, a vampire having the form of a human head whose huge
ears serve as wings for its nocturnal flights, is reminiscent of
the travelling heads which form so important a group of bogeys
on the North American continent.

With such an array of demons surrounding them, it is small
marvel that for the Chilean peasant of today the devil is not an
interesting person in popular mythology, as Senor Vicuna
Cifuentes tells us,7 playing a role altogether inferior to those
of the local demons. Beneficent powers are rare in the Arauca-
nian pantheon. Pillan may be regarded in this light, as also
Ngunemapun, a higher power recognized by the Araucans of
today, says Guevara, although not mentioned in the older
chronicles. He seems to be a doublet of Pillan, and may repre-
sent an epithet of this god, or even a still higher power to
whom invocations were formerly addressed which the Spaniards
supposed to be addressed to Pillan. Like the latter, Ngunema-
pun dwells on high mountains, has the power of rendering
himself invisible, and is given the customary form of a warrior.
Beneficent also is Huitranalhue, friend of strangers and the
protector of herds from thieves.

A curious feature of Araucanian religion is the absence of any
cult of the sun. Possibly this is due to the fact that the sun
was the great deity of their enemies, the Incas; so that even if
it had been adored in the primitive period, it might have been
degraded after the Incaic defeat on the same principle that
caused a Florida tribe to establish a cult of the Devil, because
he was the enemy of the Spaniard. The fact that the Arauca-
nians had measured the solar year, which they divided into
twelve months of thirty days each, adding five intercalary
days or epagomenae, argues a sun-cult. Molina tells us that
they began their year immediately after the December solstice,
which they called the Head-and-Tail-of-the-Year, while the
June solstice was called the Divider-of-the-Year. Dobrizhoffer
says that the Picunche, or Moluche (Araucanians), like the
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LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

Puelche, had no name for God.8 “These ascribe all the good
things they either possess or desire to the sun, and to the sun
they pray for them”; and one of their priests, he says, when told
of God, said: “Till this hour we never knew nor acknowledged
anything greater or better than the sun.” This certainly
points to the probability that in primitive times the sun was an
Araucanian god, though it appears that the moon has assumed
the place of celestial importance in the later pantheon. Her
ancient name, Anchimalguen, signifies, says Guevara, Woman
(i. e., wife)-of-the-Sun; Anchimallen is the contemporary form.
She is implored in adversity and praised in prosperity, say the
chroniclers. Sometimes Anchimallen is of ill omen, appearing
at night in the form of a stray guanaco and luring travellers
to vain pursuit; but she also serves to give warning of enemies
and to frighten away evil spirits. Molina gives a very interest-
ing suggestion, namely, that all the female powers of the in-
visible world form a class of beneficent nymphs called Amchi-
malghen. “There is not an Araucanian but imagines he has
one of these in his service. Nien cai gni Jmchi-malghen, ‘I
keep my nymph still,’ is a common expression when they suc-
ceed in any undertaking.”

The mythic tales of the Araucanians are (judging from some-
what meagre materials) of a class with those prevalent in
neighbouring regions, — a cosmogony in which volcanic forces
destroy the world by fire, while a deluge causes all to perish
save a few who flee to the three-peaked mountain Thegtheg,
the Mount of Levin, which moves upon the waters; a hero
cycle in which two brothers, Konkel and Pediu, figure as trans-
formers; and there are stories of a Sky-World above, and of
seaward Islands of the Dead.9 One of the most interesting
elements of their mythology is their version of the oft-recurring
conception of a Way Perilous to the abode of the departed. An
old woman, in the form of a whale, bears the soul out to sea;
but before his arrival in the Araucanian Hades he is obliged
to pay toll for passing a narrow strait, where sits another
 THE PAMPAS TO THE LAND OF FIRE 331

malignant hag who exacts an eye from any poor wretch who
has nothing better to pay.

IV. THE PATAGONIANS

Few peoples have had fame thrust upon them with so little
reason as have the Patagonian Indians, and few myths have
been more widely credited than that Patagonia was the home
of a race of giants. The Tehuelche are, as a matter of fact, men
of large size, probably averaging above six feet; and they are
noted for the large development, especially of the upper parts
of their body. Keane states that they are second in size among
South American peoples, being exceeded by the Bororo. Possi-
bly it was due to the fact that the first navigators of this region
were men of south Europe, themselves short, which gave rise
to the myth of Patagonian giants. Pigafetta,10 the chief chroni-
cler of Magellan’s voyage, says of one of these “giants” that
he was “so tall that our heads scarcely came up to his waist,”
and the anonymous “Genoese pilot” who has left an account of
the same navigation reports that where they wintered, in 1520,
“there were people like savages, and the men are from nine to
ten spans in height, very well made.” It is, indeed, possible
that the stature of the modem Tehuelche is modified slightly
from that of the Patagon, or “Big-Foot” (“the captain named
this kind of people Pataghom,” wrote Pigafetta); for since the
middle of the eighteenth century the Tehuelche have been an
equestrian people, living on horseback, one might say; and a
recent observer says of them that “the lower limbs are some-
times disappointing, being, in fact, the lower limbs of a race of
riders.” Such an influence may well have produced a small
diminution of the average stature over that at the time of the
first observations.

In no other respect is the Patagonian remarkable. The race
is divided into two great divisions, the northerly Pueiche and
the Tehuelche, of Patagonia proper, now both equestrian
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peoples. Across the Strait of Magellan, in eastern Tierra del
Fuego, dwell the Ona, still a pedestrian branch of the Pata-
gonian race.

The Patagonians are a sluggish and peaceable people, quite
self-sufficient when left to themselves, and in the south little
influenced by the arts of civilization. Except for the changes
which the introduction of horses has brought into their life,
the description of the Genoese pilot is essentially true to this
day:10 “They have not got houses; they only go about from
one place to another . . . and eat meat nearly raw: they are
all archers and kill many animals with arrows, and with the
skins they make clothes. . . . Wherever night finds them,
there they sleep; they carry their wives along with them with
all the chattels they possess.”

Accounts of Patagonian religion are all meagre; perhaps be-
cause the ideational content of their belief is itself meagre,
for authorities agree that they are slow and unimaginative.
The little information given by Pigafetta, chronicler of Magel-
lan’s voyage, has, to be sure, a moving background. Two of
the “giants,” he says, were lured on shipboard, and there,
while being entertained with gauds, were clamped with irons,
the intention being to take them for a show to the Castilian
king. “When they saw the trick which had been played them,
they began to be enraged, and to foam like bulls, crying out
very loud Setebos, that is to say, the great devil, that he should
help them.” It is from this passage that Shakespeare derived
his conception of the god of Caliban. Pigafetta adds that the
lesser devils, under Setebos, are called Cheleule. “This one
who was in the ship with us, told us by signs that he had seen
devils with two horns on their heads, and long hair down to
their feet, who threw out fire from their mouths and rumps,” —
but we can hardly doubt that the navigators’ imaginations
were here potent interpreters of the signs. Dobrizhoffer’s
eighteenth century description of Patagonian beliefs is essen-
tially the same as that of Prichard in the twentieth century.11
 THE PAMPAS TO THE LAND OF FIRE 333

“They are all acquainted with the devil, whom they call
Balichu [Falichu, Gualichu, are variants found in other
sources]. They believe that there is an innumerable crowd of
demons, the chief of whom they name El El, and all the in-
ferior ones Quezubu [probably a form of the Araucanian
Huecuvu]. They think, however, every kind of demon hostile
and mischievous to the human race, and the origin of all evil,
regarding them in consequence with dread and abhorrence.”
Dobrizhoffer goes on to state that the Puelche and the Arau-
canian Picunche alike revere the Sun, indicating the affinity
of the beliefs of the two groups, which are probably at least
remotely related. He continues: “The Patagonians call God
Soychu [Soucha is Pennant’s variant], to-wit, that which can-
not be seen, which is worthy of all veneration, which does not
live in the world; hence they call the dead Soychuhet, men that
dwell with God beyond the world. They seem to hold two
principles in common with the Gnostics and Manichaeans,
for they say that God created both good and evil demons.
The latter they greatly fear, but never worship. They believe
every sick person to be possessed of an evil demon; hence their
physicians always carry a drum with figures of devils painted
on it, which they strike at the beds of sick persons, to drive the
evil demon, which causes the disorder, from the body.”

Prichard’s description adds nothing to this.12 The religion of
the Indians consists “in the old simple beliefs in good spirits
and devils, but chiefly devils. . . . The dominant Spirit of
Evil is called Gualicho. And he abides as an ever-present
terror behind their strange, free, and superstitious lives. They
spend no small portion of their time in either fleeing from his
wrath or in propitiating it. You may wake in the dawn to see
a band of Indians suddenly rise and leap upon their horses,
and gallop away across the pampa, howling and gesticulating.
They are merely scaring the Gualicho away from their tents
back to his haunts in the Cordillera — the wild and unpene-
trated mountains, where he and his subordinate demons groan
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LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

in chosen spots the long nights through.” The Good Spirit of
the Tehuelche, says Prichard, is far more quiescent. Long ago
he made one effort to benefit mankind, when he created the
animals in the caves of “God’s Hill” and gave them to his
people for food, but since then he has shown little interest in
earthly matters. Of the practices of the Tehuelche shaman —
perhaps an innovation since the day of Dobrizhoffer—Prichard
gives an odd instance, narrated by another white observer: “In
the middle of the level white pampa two figures upon galloping
horses were visible. As we came nearer we saw that one was a
man clothed in a chiripa and a capa in which brown was the
predominating colour. He was mounted on a heavy-necked
powerful cebruno horse, his stirrups were of silver, and his gear
of raw-hide seemed smart and good. As he rode he yelled with
all his strength, producing a series of the most horrible and
piercing shrieks. But strange as was this wild figure, his com-
panion, victim or quarry, was stranger and more striking still.
For on an ancient zaino sat perched a little brown maiden,
whose aspect was forelorn and pathetic to the last degree. She
rode absolutely naked in the teeth of the bitter cold, her breast,
face and limbs blotched and smeared with the rash of some
eruptive disease, and her heavy-lidded eyes, strained and open,
staring ahead across the leagues of empty snow-patched plain.
Presently the man redoubled his howls, and bearing down upon
the zaino flogged and frightened it into yet greater speed. The
whole scene might have been mistaken for some ancient bar-
baric and revolting form of punishment; whereas, in real truth,
it was an anxious Indian father trying, according to his lights,
to cure his daughter of measles!” Devils are known to dislike
noise and cold, says Prichard; hence, the unlucky patient
without a shred to protect her and “the almost incredible up-
roar made by the old gentleman upon the dark brown horse.”
D’Orbigny says 13 of the Tehuelche, “they fear rather than
revere their Achekanet-kanet, turn by turn genius of ill and
genius of good,” and of the Puelche that, like the Patagonians,
 THE PAMPAS TO THE LAND OF FIRE 335

they believe in a genius of ill, named Gualichu, or Arraken,
who sometimes becomes beneficent, without need of prayer.
Falkner (cited by King in The Voyage of the Beagle, vol. ii,
p. 161) mentions “at the head of their good deities,” Guayara-
kunny, lord of the dead. “They think,” he says, “that the
good deities have habitations in vast caverns under the earth,
and that when an Indian dies his soul goes to live with the
deity who presides over his particular family. They believe
that their good deities made the world, and that they first
created the Indians in the subterranean caverns above men-
tioned; gave them the lance, bow and arrows, and the balls
[1bolas], to fight and hunt with, and then turned them out to
shift for themselves. They imagine that the deities of the
Spaniards created them in a similar manner, but that, instead
of lances, bows, etc., they gave them guns and swords. They
say that when the beasts, birds, and lesser animals were created,
those of the more nimble kind came immediately out of the
caverns; but that the bulls and cows being the last, the Indians
were so frightened at the sight of their horns, that they stopped
the entrances of their caves with great stones. This is the grave
reason why they had no black cattle in their country, till the
Spaniards brought them over; who, more wisely, had let them
out of their caves.”

A more recent account of what is a kindred, if not the same
myth is given by Ramon Lista.14 The creator-hero, in this ver-
sion, is named El-lal. “El-lal came into the world in a strange
way. His father Nosjthej (a kind of Saturn), wishing to devour
him, had snatched him from his mother’s womb. He owed his
rescue to the intervention of the terguerr (a rodent) which
carried him away to its cave; this his father tried in vain to
enter. After having learned from the famous rodent the proper-
ties of different plants and the directions of the mountain-paths,
El-lal himself invented the bow and arrow, and with these
weapons began the struggle against the wild animals — puma,
fox, condor, — and conquered them all. But the father re-
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336

[Prometheus]

turned. Forgetting the past El-lal taught him how to manipu-
late the bow and the sling, and joyfully showed him the trophies
of the chase — tortoise shells, condor’s wings, etc. Nosjthej
took up his abode in the cave and soon acted as master of it.
Faithful to his fierce instincts, he wanted to kill1 his son; he
followed him across the Andes, but, when on the point of reach-
ing him, he saw a dense forest arise between him and his son.
El-lal was saved; he descended to the plain, which meanwhile
had become peopled with men. Among them was a giant,
Goshy-e, who devoured children; El-lal tried to fight him, but
he was invulnerable; the arrows broke against his body. Then
El-lal transformed himself into a gadfly, entered the giant’s
stomach, and wounded him fatally with this sting. It was not
until he had accomplished all these feats, and had proved him-
self a clever huntsman, that El-lal thought of marrying. He
asked the hand of the daughter of the Sun, but she did not think
him worthy of her and escaped him by a subterfuge. Disen-
chanted, El-lal decided to leave the earth, where, he considered,
his mission was at an end, since man, who had in the meantime
appeared in the plain and in the mountain valleys, had learned
from him the use of fire, weapons, etc. Borne on the wings
of a swan across the ocean towards the east, he found eternal
rest in the verdant island which rose among the waves at the
places where the arrows shot by him had fallen on the surface
of the water.”

This cosmogony is of the familiar primitive Indian type.
Falkner, in the passage cited, goes on to describe Patagonian
beliefs in regard to the fates of human souls: “ Some say that the
stars are old Indians; that the Milky Way is the field where the
old Indians hunt ostriches [more likely, this myth attaches to
the Southern Cross, as Guevara says it does with the Indians
of Paraguay; and as, in North America, it attaches to the Ursa
Major], and that the Magellan clouds are the feathers of the
ostriches which they kill. They have an opinion that the crea-
tion is not yet exhausted; nor is all of it yet come out to the
 THE PAMPAS TO THE LAND OF FIRE 337

daylight of this upper world. The wizards, beating their drums,
and rattling their hide bags full of shells or stones, pretend to
see into other regions under the earth. Each wizard is supposed
to have familiar spirits in attendance, who give supernatural
information, and execute the conjurer’s will. They believe
that the souls of their wizards, after death, are of the number
of these demons, called Valichu, to whom every evil, or un-
pleasant event is attributed.”

Mutatis mutandis this description would apply perfectly to
the shamanistic beliefs and practices of the Polar North, and it
is not without significance that Prichard is drawn to point the
essential analogy between the austral and boreal aborigines of
America. Substitute the kayak for the horse, the seal for the
guanaco, with such differences in habit as these imply, and
the differences of the two peoples (psychologically, for it must
be owned that in stature they are antipodes) become slight.
Certainly their beliefs are almost identical: a beneficent, but
precarious food-giver; a host of spiteful and dangerous powers
of wind and weather; a sky-wo rid and an underworld, with
hunter-souls pursuing their earthly vocation; fey-sighted
wizards and medicine-men with drums. To be sure this repre-
sents the foundation stratum of Indian ideas throughout the
two Americas, the simplest form of American religious myth;
but there is surely a dramatic propriety in finding this simplest
form, almost in its first purity, at the wide extremes of the two
continents.

Have the conceptions travelled, from pole almost to pole?
or are they separate inspirations to a universal human nature
from a never vastly varying environmental nature? This is a
riddle not easy to solve; for while it is not difficult to imagine
unrelated peoples severally framing the notion that men and
animals are born out of the womb of Earth or that the image
of their own hunting parties is written in the constellations —
for, as Molina remarks, more than one people have “regulated
the things of heaven by those of the earth,” — still it is odd to
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338

find such particular agreements constant from latitude to
latitude throughout a hemisphere.

V. THE FUEGIANS

The Yahgan and Alakaluf tribes of Tierra del Fuego and the
adjacent archipelago enjoy the unenviable distinction of being
rated as among the lowest of human beings both as to actual
culture and possible development. The earlier navigators re-
garded them as little more than animals — and often, unfor-
tunately, treated them no better. Even Darwin, viewing them
with the naturalist’s eye, saw little but annoyance in their
presence and formed a dismal estimate of their powers. “We
were always much surprised at the little notice, or rather none
whatever, which was evinced respecting many things, even such
as boats, the use of which must have been evident. Simple
circumstances, — such as the whiteness of our skins, the beauty
of scarlet cloth or blue beads, the absence of women, our care
in washing ourselves, — excited their admiration far more than
a grand or complicated object, such as the ship.”15 Darwin,
however, noted that the Indians had a sense of fairness in trade,
and when missionaries settled among them other good quali-
ties appeared. Thomas Bridges, who lived with the Yahgan
as missionary for years, wrote of them, in 1891: “We find the
natives work well and happily when assured of adequate reward.
They shear our sheep, make fences, saw out boards and planks
of all kinds, work well with the pick and spade, are good boat-
men and pleasant companions.” With such a tribute from one
who had lived long with them it can hardly be doubted that
the Yahgan are better than the common report of them, —
indeed, quite the children of nature which the not unaffecting
anecdotes of York Minster and Jemmy Button, among the
voyages of the Beagle, should lead us to expect.

“Jemmy Button,” says Captain Fitzroy,16 “was very super-
stitious and a great believer in omens and dreams. He would
 THE PAMPAS TO THE LAND OF FIRE 339

not talk of a dead person, saying, with a grave shake of the
head, ‘no good, no good talk; my country never talk of dead
man.’ While at sea, on board the Beagle, about the middle of
the year 1832, he said one morning to Mr. Bynoe, that in the
night some man came to the side of his hammock, and whispered
in his ear that his father was dead. Mr. Bynoe tried to laugh
him out of the idea, but ineffectually. He fully believed that
such was the case, and maintained his opinion up to the time
of finding his relations in the Beagle Channel, when, I regret to
say, he found that his father had died some months previously.
He did not forget to remind Mr. Bynoe (his most confidential
friend) of their former conversation, and, with a significant
shake of the head said, it was ‘bad — very bad.’ Yet these
simple words seemed to express the extent of his sorrow.” . . .
Here is surely as good a case of the “veridical” apparition as
any Researcher could desire.

“Ideas of a spiritual existence — of beneficent and evil pow-
ers,” describes the nearest notion Captain Fitzroy could get of
Fuegian religion. The powers of evil are especially the powers
of wind and weather — naturally enough in a part of the globe
world-famous for its bitter gales and treacherous waters. “If
anything was said or done that was wrong, in their opinion it
was certain to cause bad weather. Even the shooting of young
birds, before they were able to fly, was thought a heinous of-
fence. I remember York Minster saying one day to Mr. Bynoe,
when he had shot some young ducks with the old bird — ‘Oh,
Mr. Bynoe, very bad to shoot little duck — come wind —
come rain — blow — very much blow.’” Primitive as they
are, here are moral ideas — whether one explain, reconditely,
the sparing of the young of game as an instinctive conservation
of the food supply, or, simply, as due to a natural and chival-
rous pity for the helpless young.

Our information in regard to the spirit-beings believed in by
the Fuegians is at best nebulous. Captain Fitzroy tells of “a
great black man . . . supposed to be always wandering about
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LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

the woods and mountains, who is certain of knowing every word
and action, who cannot be escaped, and who influences the
weather according to men’s conduct,” and again of thin wild
men, “who have no belly,” (surely, the “skeleton men” of the
Eskimo and of other North American tribes). Dr. Hyades,17
in his report of the gleanings of the French Mission to Cape
Horn, half a century after the famous expeditions of the Adven-
ture and Beagle, gives a fuller, though still meagre description
of these wild folk of Yahgan fancy, — irresistibly reminiscent
of the Fog People and the Inland Dwellers of the Eskimo at the
other extreme of the hemisphere. The Oualapatou, Wild Men
from the West, are ever-present terrors. They are heard in
the noises of the night, and hearing them, the Yahgan incon-
tinently flee. These Wild Men, they say, enter their huts at
night, cut the throats of the occupants and devour their limbs.
From their confused accounts, says Dr. Hyades, it would appear
that the Oualapatou are the dead returned to earth to eat the
living; they are invisible, except at the moment of seizing their
victims, but they are heard imitating the cries of birds and
animals. Another class of wild beings are the Kachpikh, fan-
tastic beings that live in desert caves or in thick forests. These,
too, are invisible, but they hate man and cause disease and
death. Still another class (reported by the Missionary Bridges)
are called Hannouch. Some of these are supposed to have an
eye in the back of their heads; others are hairless and sleep
standing up supported by a tree; they hold in hand a white
stone which they hurl with inevitable aim at any object soever,
and they sometimes attack and wound men. One man, said to
have been stolen away as a child by the Hannouch, was named
Hannouchmachaainan, “stolen-by-the-Hannouch.” Any man
who goes off to live by himself is called a Hannouch, while a
demented person is regarded as tormented by one of these
beings.

The Fuegian’s equivalent for the Eskimo’s Angakok is the
Yakamouch. Bridges’ account is quoted by Hyades: “Nearly
 THE PAMPAS TO THE LAND OF FIRE 341

every old man of the people is a Yakamouch, for it is very easy
to become one; they are recognizable at a glance from the gray
colour of their hair, a colour produced by the daily application of
a whitish clay. They make frequent incantations in which they
appear to address a mysterious being named A'fapakal; they
claim to possess, from a spirit called Hoakils, a supernatural
power of life and death; they recount their dreams, and when
they have eaten in dream any person, this signifies that that
person will die. It is believed that they can draw from the
bodies of the sick the cause of their ill, called aikouch, visible
in the form of an arrow or a harpoon point of flint, which they
cause, moreover, to issue from their own stomachs at will. . . .
They seem to believe that these sorcerers can influence the
weather for good or bad; they throw shells into the wind to
cause it to cease and they give themselves over to incan-
tations and contortions.” Women also may be Yakamouch,
and there is even a report that formerly none but women
professed the art.

The Fuegians are a vanishing people,—even in a vanishing
race. They have long and often been cited as a people with-
out religion. After recounting what is here narrated of their
beliefs, Dr. Hyades concludes: “In all these legends, we see no
reason seriously to admit a belief in supernatural beings or in a
future life, and consequently a religious sentiment, among the
Fuegians.” This judgement, however, is not wholly supported
by the observations of others. According to the fathers of the
Salesian mission18 the Alakaluf believe in “an invisible being
called Taquatu, whom they imagine to be a giant who travels
by day and night in a big, canoe, over the sea and rivers, and
who glides as well through the air over the tops of the trees
without bending their branches; if he finds any men or women
idle or not on the alert he takes them without more ado into
his great boat and carries them far away from home.” Captain
Low, of the Fitzroy expedition, asserted that there was not
only a belief in “an immense black man” (Yaccy-ma) responsi-
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ble for all sorts of evil, among the west Patagonian channel
natives, but also that they believed in “a good spirit whom
they called Yerri Yuppon,” invoked in time of distress and
danger. On the other point, of belief in a future life, there is no
doubt but that the Fuegians recognize some form of ghost, or
breath-spirit, which haunts the walks of men. One missionary
says of the Yahgan that he thinks that “when a man dies, his
breath goes up to heaven”; nothing similar occurs in the case
of animals.

Of myth in the legendary form only meagre fragments have
been gathered from the Fuegians, and of these the greater part
come from the Ona, who are akin to the Tehuelche.19 According
to Ona lore there formerly “lived on earth bearded white men;
the sun and moon were then husband and wife; when men began
to war, the sun and moon returned to the sky and sent down a
red star, the planet Mars, which turned into a giant on the way;
the giant killed all men, then made two mountains or clods of
clay, from one of which rose the first Ona man and from the
other the first Ona woman.” The same tribe have a tradition
of a cataclysm which separated the island on which they dwell
from the mainland. Both the Ona and the Yahgan have tradi-
tions of a flood and tales of earth-born men; and each of these
peoples has also a mythic hero (Kuanip is the Ona, Oumoara
the Yahgan name) concerning whom tales are told. Some of
their stories appear to relate to historical transformations in the
mode of tribal life, as the tradition (maintained by both tribes)
that in former times the women were the tribal rulers, that
the men rebelled, and invented initiation rites and the ruse
of masked spirits in order to keep the women in subjection —
a type of myth which, however, is rather more plausibly of an
aetiological than of an historical character. In the main,
nature is the theme of mythic thought, and there is perhaps
no more unique a group of ideas among these peoples of the Far
South than the Yahgan conception of the relations of the
celestial beings: the moon, they say, is the wife of the rainbow,
 THE PAMPAS TO THE LAND OF FIRE 343

while the sun is elder brother to the moon and to shining
Venus.

There is much in the culture and fancies of these peoples of
austral America to recall the culture and fancies of their remote
kinsmen of the Polar North. The two Americas measure, as it
were, the longitude of human habitation, marked off zone by
Zone into every variety of climate and terrain to which men’s
lives can be accommodated. Moreover, the native peoples of
this New World show a oneness of race nowhere else to be
found over so great an area; so that, in spite of differences
in culture almost as great as those which mark the heights and
depths of human condition in the more anciently peopled hemi-
sphere, there is a recognizable unity binding together Eskimo
and Aztec, Inca and Yahgan. Now what is surely most im-
pressive is that this unity is best represented neither by physical
appearance nor material achievement (where, indeed, the dif-
ferences are most magnified), but by a conservation of ideas
and of the symbolic language of myth which is at bottom one.
Not that there is any single level of thought common to all,
for there is surely a world of intelligence between the imagina-
tive splendour of Mayan art and science and tradition and the
dimly haunted soul of the Fuegian who “supposes the sun and
moon, male and female, to be very old indeed, and that some
old man, who knew their maker, had died without leaving in-
formation on this subject”;20 but that no matter what the
failure to build or the erosion of superstructure, or indeed no
matter what the variety of superstructures as, for example,
made apparent in the characteristic colours of North American
and South American mythologies, there is still aufond a single
racial complexion of mind, with a recognizable kinship of the
spiritual life. Through vast geographical distances, among
peoples long mutually forgotten if ever mutually known, in
every variety of natural garb, polar and tropical, forest and sea,
this kinship persists, not favoured by, but in spite of, environ-
 344

LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

ments the most changing. It is not necessary here invariably
to assume migrations of ideas, passed externally from tribe to
tribe, although evidence of these, recent and remote, is frequent
enough; it is not sufficient to postulate merely the psychical
unity of our common human nature, although this, too, is a
factor which we should not neglect; but along with these we
may reasonably conceive that the American race, through its
long isolation, even in its most tenuously connected branches
retains a certain deep communion of thought and feeling, a
lasting participation in its own mode of insight and its own
quest of inspiration, which unites it across the stretches of
time and space. The arctic tern is said to summer in the two
polar zones, arctic and antarctic, trued to its enormous flight
by the most mystifying of all animal instincts. Perhaps it is
some human instinct as profound and as mystifying which
joins in one thought the scattered peoples of the two continents,
.charting in modes more subtle than their obvious forms can
suggest the impulses which lead men to see their environmental
world not as their physical eyes perceive it, but, belied by their
eyes, as inner and whispering voices proclaim it to be.
 NOTES
 
 NOTES

Introduction

1.   That there is an ultimate community of culture and thought
between the Andean and Mexican regions can hardly be doubted.
Furthermore, it is not merely primitive, but belongs to an era of
some advancement in the arts. Spinden (.Ancient Civilizations of
Mexico and Central America [New York, 1917], and elsewhere) has
termed the early stage the “archaic period,” and he plausibly argues
for its Mexican origination and southward migration. But at any
rate since near the beginning of the Christian Era the civilizations of
the two regions have developed in virtual independence.

2.   The most admirable general introduction to the whole subject
of American ethnography is Wissler, The American Indian (New
York, 1917).

3.   The transition from the Antilles to Guiana is, however, rather
more marked than is that from the Orinoco to the Amazonian regions.
Virtually the whole South American region bounded by the Andes,
the Caribbean Sea, and the Argentinian Pampas is one ethnographi-
cally; so that, in the present work, Chapters VIII and IX are de-
scriptive of a single region. However, the great rivers have always
been natural routes of exploration, and this has given to the river
systems an ethnographically factitious, but bibliographically real
differentiation.

[Prometheus]

4.   Wm. Henry Brett, Legends and Myths of the Aboriginal Indians
of British Guiana (London, no date).

5.   For a history of this interesting movement in certain phases of
European culture see Gilbert Chinard, VExotisme americain (Paris,
1911).

Chapter I

1.   Among early writers on Antillean religion the most important
are Christopher Columbus, Ramon Pane, and Peter Martyr d’Anghi-
era. Columbus left Fray Ramon Pane in Haiti with instructions to
report on the religious beliefs of the natives; and in Fernando Colum-
bus’s Historie, ch. lxii, Pane’s narrative is incorporated, introduced
by a brief quotation from Christopher Columbus, describing Zemiism.
 348 LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

After Pane, the account of Haitian religion in Peter Martyr’s “First
Decade” is the most important source, although Benzoni, Gomara,
Herrera, Las Casas, and Oviedo give additional or corroborative
information. Of recent writings those of J. W. Fewkes, embodying
the results of careful archaeological studies, form the most important,
contribution. Part ii of Joyce’s Central American and West Indian
Archaeology gives a general survey of the field, which is more briefly
treated in livre ii, 3® partie, of Beuchat’s Manuel, and in its com-
parative aspects by Wissler, The American Indian.

2.   Beuchat, Joyce [a], and Fewkes describe the condition of
the Antilleans at the time of the discovery as reconstructed from
early accounts and archaeological investigations. Of the early writ-
ings, the descriptions of Las Casas are the most detailed. The use of
Taino to designate the island Arawakan tribes follows Fewkes ,
p. 26: “Among the first words heard by the comrades of Columbus
when they landed in Guadeloupe were * Taino! taino!’ — ‘Peace!
peace!’ or ‘We are friends.’ The designation ‘taino’ has been used
by several writers as a characteristic name for the Antillean race.
Since it is both significant and euphonious, it may be adopted as a
convenient substitute for the adjective ‘Antillean’ to designate a
cultural type. The author applies the term to the original sedentary
people of the West Indies, as distinguished from the Carib.” The
incident to which reference is made is described in Select Letters of
Columbus (HS), p. 28. It is perhaps worth while to note that Peter
Martyr (tr. MacNutt, i. 66, 81) says that taino signifies “a virtuous
man.” The word carib, caniba, is the source of our cannibal. It is
possible that it means “man-eater” and is of Taino origin. Colum-
bus, in the Journal of the first voyage (tr. Bourne, p. 223), is author-
ity for the statement that “Carib” is the Hispaniolan form of the
name. Im Thurn (p. 163) says that the Guiana Carib call themselves
Carinya, which would seem to show that the word is an autonym, in
which case it may mean, as Herrera says (III. v), “valiant.” It is
rather curious, if the insular Carib were the inveterate cannibals the
earlier writers make them to be, that those of the mainland should
have held the practice in abhorrence, for which we have Humboldt’s
statement, Voyage (tr. Ross, ii. 413).

3.   A term of some interest is cacique, which is generally regarded
as Haitian in origin, being, says Peter Martyr (tr. MacNutt, i. 82)
their word for “king.” Bastian, however, affirms that it is Arabic
(ii. 293, note): “Das Wort Cazique ist nicht amerikanisch, sino
arabigo, usado entre los alarabes de Africa en el Reyno de Mazagan,
con el qual nombran al principal y cabe^as de los aduares, como
tambien le nombran Xeque (meint Simon).”

4.   The literature of the discovery is summarized by Beuchat,
 NOTES

349

“Bibliographie,” ch. iv. Christopher Columbus’s Letters and Jour-
nal, tr. Major, Markham, and Bourne, are here quoted.

5.   The question of Amazons (cf. infra, Ch. IX, i), is a curious
commingling of Old and New World myth, with, perhaps, some
foundation in primitive custom, especially linguistic. Thus Beuchat,
p. 509 (citing Raymond Breton and Lucien Adam; cf. also Ballet,
citing du Tertre, pp. 398-99), states that the Caribs of the Isles had
separate vocabularies, in part at least, for men and women, and that
the women’s speech contained a majority of Arawak words. This
argument should not be pushed too far, however, for there are a num-
ber of South American languages with well-differentiated man-tongue
and woman-tongue, where a similar origin of the difference is not
shown. On his first voyage Columbus (letters to de Santangel and
Sanchez), though he did not meet them, heard of “ferocious men,
eaters of human flesh, wearing their hair long like women.” On the
second voyage — as described by Chanca in his “Letter to the Chap-
ter of Seville ” (Select Letters) — the Caribs were encountered and
found to be holding in slavery many Taino women: “In their attacks
upon the neighbouring islands, these people capture as many of the
women as they can, especially those who are young and beautiful,
and keep them as concubines; and so great a number do they carry
off, that in fifty houses no men were to be seen” (p. 31). It is added
that the Caribs ate the children born of these captive women (a cus-
tom ascribed also to some South American cannibalistic tribes); but
as it is said in the same connexion that captive boys were not de-
voured until they grew up, “for they say that the flesh of boys and
women is not good to eat,” the story is scarcely plausible. Herrera
repeats that the Caribs ate no women, but kept them as slaves, in
association with the statement that the natives of Dominica ate a
friar, and dying of a flux caused by his flesh, gave over their canni-
balism. These stories seem to point to a ritualistic element in the
cannibalism, for to the Carib the flesh of warriors was the only man’s
meat. Of course, in the notion of Amazons there was an element of
myth as well as of custom, and the myth was certainly known to
Columbus, if we may trust the authenticity (and there is small reason
to doubt it) of the paragraph with which Ramon Pane’s narrative
is introduced. For the myth in question see supra, pp. 31-32, and
cf. Pane, chh. iii-v.

6.   The story of the search for the Fountain of Youth and
of the colony of Antillean Indians in Florida is to be found in
Fontaneda, pp. 17-19. The influence of Antillean culture has been
traced well to the north of Florida, where it may have been ex-
tended by the pre-Muskhogean population; see also Herrera,

III.   v.
 350

LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

7.   The story of Hathvey, or Hatuey, is given by Fewkes , pp.
211-12, and by Joyce [a], p. 244; its source is Las Casas [a], III. xxv.

8.   West Indian idolatry, called Zemiism, is earliest described in
the passage attributed to Christopher Columbus (Fernando Colum-
bus, ch. lxi); other authorities here quoted are Benzoni, pp. 78-80;
Peter Martyr, “First Decade,” ix (tr. MacNutt, i. 167-78); Ramon
Pane, ch. xix-xxiv (tr. Pinkerton, xii. 87-89); and Las Casas ,
chh. clxvi-vii; cf. also Fewkes, especially , [e], Joyce [a], and
Beuchat.

9.   The most interesting artifacts from the Antilles are the stone
rings, triangles, and elbows, which must be regarded as certainly
ritualistic in character, and probably as used in fertility rites. This
is not only indicated by Columbus and Ramon Pane, but is sup-
ported by numerous analogies. Ramon Pane (ch. xix) says: “The
stone cemis are of several sorts: some there are which, they say, the
physicians take out of the body of the sick, and those they look upon
as best to help women in labour. Others there are that speak, which
are shaped like a long turnip, with the leaves long and extended, like
the shrub-bearing capers. Those leaves, for the most part, are like
those of the elm. Others have three points, and they think they
cause the yucca to thrive.” It is perhaps not far-fetched to see in
the triangular stones analogues of the mountain-man images of
the Tlaloque in Mexico, or of the similar images from South
America, certainly used in connexion with rain ceremonies. Very
likely separate forms were employed for different plants, as maize
or yucca. The stone rings, again, could very reasonably be those
which were supposed to help women in labour, as seems to have
been the case with the analogous rings and yokes from Yucatan
(see Fewkes, 25 ARBE, pp. 259-61). Even if the two types of
stones were combined, as seems altogether likely, at least for magic
and divination, there is congruity in the relationship of both types
to fertility, animal and vegetable respectively. Senor J. J. Acosta
has suggested that the Antillean stone rings represent the bodies,
and the triangular stones the heads, of serpents; and this is not
without plausibility in view of the frequency with which serpents are
regarded as fertility emblems. It may be worth recalling, too, that
an Antillean name for doctor, or medicine-man, signified “serpent.”

10.   There is no reason to assume any essential difference in char-
acter in the shamans or medicine-men of the North and South Ameri-
can Indians. In general, the lower the tribe in the scale of political
organization, the more important is the shaman or doctor, and the
more distinctly individual and the less tribal are the offices which he
performs; as organization grows in social complexity, the function of
priest emerges as distinct from that of doctor, the priest becoming
 NOTES

35i

the depository of ritual, and the doctor or shaman, on a somewhat
lower level, attending the sick or practising magic and prophecy.
Apparently in the Antilles the two offices were on the way to differ-
entiation, if, indeed, they were not already distinct. The bohutis,
buhuitihus, boii, or, as Peter Martyr latinizes, bovites of this region
were evidently both doctors and priests. Certainly both Ramon
Pane’s and Peter Martyr’s descriptions imply this; though there are
some hints which would seem to point to a special class of ritual
priests, who may or may not have been doctors, as when priests are
said to act as mouthpieces of the cacique in giving oracles from
hollow statues, or as when Martyr (following Pane) says that “only
the sons of chiefs” are allowed to learn the traditional chants of the
great ceremonials (p. 172). The term peaiman, applied to the sha-
mans of the Guiana tribes, is, says im Thurn (p. 328), an Anglicized
form of the Carib word puyai or peartzan. The peaiman, im Thurn
states, “is not simply the doctor, but also, in some sense, the priest
or magician.” As matter of fact, the priestly element is slight among
the continental Caribs, their practice being pure shamanism; and
Fewkes (, p. 54) says that they “ still speak of their priests as ceci-
semi” — a term clearly related to zemi. “The prehistoric Porto
Ricans,” he says again (ib. p. 59), “had a well-developed priesthood,
called boii (serpents), mabouya, and buhiti, which are apparently
dialect or other forms of the same word.” It was in Porto Rico, of
course, that Carib and Tai’no elements were most mixed. Brett [a],
p. 363, in a note, derives the word piai from Carib puiai, which, he
says, is in Ackawoi piatsan; while the Arawak use semecihi, and the
Warau wisidaa, for the same functionary. Certainly the resemblance
of boye and puiai, and of zemi and semecihi, or ceci-semi, indicates
identities of origin, though the particular meanings are not alto-
gether the same.

11.   Little is preserved of Antillean myth, and that little is contained
almost wholly in the narrative of Ramon Pane. The authorities here
quoted are [Ramon Pane, chh. i, ix-xi, ii-vii (tr. Pinkerton, xii);
Peter Martyr (tr. MacNutt, i. 167-70); Benzoni; and Ling Roth, in
JAI xvi. 264-65. Stoddard gives free versions of several of the tales.

12.   Peter Martyr, loc. cit. (quoting pp. 166-67, 172-76).

13.   Gomara [a], ch. xxvii, p. 173, ed. Vedia (tr. Fewkes , pp.
66-67); cf- Benzoni, pp. 79-82; Las Casas , ch. clxvii. The plate
representing the Earth Spirit ceremony is taken from (cf. Fewkes
, Plate IX) Picart, The Religious Ceremonies and Customs of the
Several Nations of the known World, London, 1731-37, Plate No. 78.

?*14. Im Thurn, pp. 335-38; cf. Fewkes [e], p. 355*

15. Ramon Pane, chh. xiv, xxv; Gomara [a], ch. xxxiii, pp. 175—
76, ed. Vedia, gives supplementary information.
 352

LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

16. Authorities cited for Carib lore are Columbus, Select Letters,
pp. 29-37; Thurn, pp. 192, 217, 222; Fewkes , pp. 27, 217-20,
68; Ballet, citing du Tertre and others, pp. 421-22, 433-38, 400-01;
Davies, cited by Fewkes , pp. 60, 65; Currier, citing la Borde,
pp. 508-09.

Chapter II

1.   Holmes, “Areas of American Culture” (in A A, new series, xvi,
I9I4) gives a chart of North America showing five culture areas for
Mexico and Central America, in general corresponding to the group-
ing here made. The American Indian of Wissler, the Ancient Civiliza-
tions of Spinden, the Manuel of Beuchat and the Mexican Archae-
ology of Joyce follow approximately the same lines. E. G. Tarayre’s
“Report” in Archives de la commission scientifique du Mexique, iii
(Paris, 1867) contains “Notes ethnographiques sur les regions mexi-
caines.” For linguistic divisions the standard works are Orozco y
Berra , Nicolas Leon [a], and especially Thomas and Swanton,
Indian Languages of Mexico and Central America {44 BBE); cf.
Mechling . Contemporary ethnography is described in Lumholtz
[a], , [c], in McGee, and in Starr [a], .

2.   Doubtless it should be stated at the outset that there is serious
and reasonable question on the part of not a few students of aborig-
inal Mexico as to whether Aztec institutions merit the name “em-
pire” in any sense analogous to those of the imperial states of the
Old World. “A loose confederacy of democratic Indians” is the
phrase employed by Waterman [a], p. 250, in describing the form of
the Mexican state as it is pictured by Morgan, Bandelier, Fiske, and
others (see Waterman, loc. cit., for sources); and it is altogether rea-
sonable to expect that Americanist studies will eventually show that
the great Middle American nations were developed from, and re-
tained characteristics of, communities resembling the Pueblos of our
own Southwest rather than the European states which the Spaniards
had in the eye when they made their first observations. It is to be
expected, too, that a changed complexion put upon the interpretation
of Mexican society will eventually modify the interpretation of
Mexican ritual and mythology, giving it, for example, something
less of the uranian significance upon which scholars of the school of
Forstemann and Seler put so great weight, and something more, if
not of the Euhemerism of Brasseur de Bourbourg, at least of reliance
upon social motives and historical traditions.

3.   Of all regions of primitive America, ancient Mexico is repre-
sented by the most extensive literature; and here, too, more has been
transmitted directly from native sources than is the case elsewhere.
The hieroglyphic codices, the anonymous Historia de los Mexicanos
 NOTES

353

por sus pinturas and Hisioria de los Reynos de Colhuacan y de Mexico
(better known and commonly cited as The Annals of Quauhtitlan),
and the writings of men of native blood in the Spanish period, notably
Ixtlilxochitl, Tezozomoc, and Chimalpahin, are the most important
of these sources; unless, as is doubtless proper, the works of Sahagun,
originally written in Nahuatl from native sources, be here included
— undoubtedly the single source of greatest importance. Among
Spanish writers of the early period, after Sahagun, the most im-
portant are Cristobal del Castillo, Diego Duran, Gomara, Herrera,
Mendieta, Motolinia, Tobar, and Torquemada. Boturini, Clavigero,
Veytia, Kingsborough, Prescott, and Brasseur de Bourbourg are
important names of the intermediate period; while recent scholarship
is represented by Brinton, Bancroft, Hamy, Garcia Icazbalceta, Orozco
y Berra, Penafiel, Ramirez, Rosny, and most conspicuously by Seler.
The most convenient recent introductions to the subject are afforded
by Beuchat, Manuel; Joyce, Mexican Archaeology; Spinden, Ancient
Civilizations of Mexico; while the best guide to the whole literature
is Lehmann’s “Ergebnisse und Aufgaben der mexikanistischen
Forschung,” in Archiv fur Anthropologie, new series, vi, 1907 (trans-
lated as Methods and Results in Mexican Research, Paris, 1909). But
while the material is relatively abundant, it is so only for the dom-
inant race represented by the Aztec. For the non-Nahuatlan
civilizations of Mexico the literature is sparse, especially upon
the side of mythology. Sahagun gives certain details, mainly in-
cidental, except in X. xxix, which is devoted to a brief description
of the peoples of Mexico. Gomara, Herrera, and Torquemada
afford added materials, touching several regions. For the Totonac-
Huastec region the sources are particularly scanty, except for
such descriptions of externals as naturally appear in the chronicles
of Cortez, Bernal Diaz, and other conquistadores who here made
their first intimate acquaintance with the mainland natives.
Fewkes [g] deals with the monuments of the Totonac region, and
expresses the opinion (p. 241, note) that the Codex Tro-Cortesianus,
commonly said to be Maya, was obtained in this region, near Cem-
poalan; Holmes , and Seler, in numerous places, are also material
sources for interpretation of the monuments. For the Tarascans of
Michoacan the most important source is an anonymous Relacion de
las ceremonias, rictos, poblacion y gobernacion de los Indios de Michua-
can hecha al illmo. Sr. D. Ant. de Mendoza (Madrid, 1875; Morelia,
1903), while of recent studies Nicolas Leon’s Los Tarascos (see
Leon [c]) is the most comprehensive. The Mixtec-Zapotec area fares
better, both as to number of sources and later studies. Burgoa, Juan
de Cordoba, Gregorio Garcia, Balsalobre, Herrera, Las Casas, and
Torquemada are the primary authorities; while the most significant
 LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

354

later studies are doubtless those of Seler, “The Mexican Chronology
with Special Reference to the Zapotec Calendar,” and “Wall Paint-
ings of Mitla,” both in 28 BBE. Brasseur de Bourbourg [a], bk. ix,
deals with the Mixtec-Zapotec and Tarascan peoples, and is still a
good introduction to the literature. Cf. also Alvarez; Castellanos
(himself a Zapotec); Genin; Leon [d]; Mechling; Portillo; Radin.

4.   The works of Clavigero, Helps, Prescott, Orozco y Berra ,
and Veytia are the best-known histories narrating the Spanish con-
quest of Mexico. Of the earlier writers Bernal Diaz, who took part
in the expeditions of Cordova and Grijalva, as well as in that of
Cortez, is the most important (of his work there are several English
translations besides that of Maudsley in HS — by Maurice Keatinge,
London, 1800, by John G. Lockhart, London, 1844, and a condensed
version by Kate Stephens, The Mastering of Mexico, New York, 1915).

5.   Bernal Diaz, ch. xcii (quoted), describes the ascent of the
temple overlooking Tlatelolco. Seler^ [a], ii. 769-70, says that on
the upper platform were two shrines, one to Tlaloc, the other to the
three idols described by Bernal Diaz, of which the principal was not
“Huichilobos” (Huitzilopochtli), but Coatlicue, the earth goddess.
The “page” Seler regards as the tutelary of Tlatelolco, called Tla-
cauepan. The great temple of Huitzilopochtli was in the centre of
the city, on the site of the present Cathedral. See Leon y Gama;
Seler [a], loc. cit.; and cf. Zelia Nuttall, “L’Eveque Zumarraga et les
principales idoles du Templo Mayor de Mexico,” in SocAA xxx
(^n).

[Prometheus]

6.   General descriptions of the Aztec pantheon are given by Beu-
chat, livre ii, le partie, chh. v, vi, and by Joyce , ch. ii. The most
important early source is Sahagun, bk. i; other primary sources are
Mendieta, bk. ii (derived from de Olmos), Leon y Gama (in part
from Cristobal del Castillo), Ruiz de Alarcon, Jacinto de la Serna,
the Tratado de los ritos y ceremonias y dioses of the Codice Ramirez
(see Tobar, in Bibliography), and the explanations of the Codices
Vaticanus A and Telleriano-Remensis (Kingsborough, v, vi). Of
recent works the most significant are Seler [a] (collected essays), and
, [c], [d], [e] (analyses of divinatory or astrological codices).

7.   For data concerning the use of these numbers by American
peoples north of Mexico, see Mythology of All Races, Boston, 1916, x,
Ch. IX, iv, and Notes 11, 31, 42, 50, with references there given.
Further allusions to the nine and thirteen of Mexican cosmology will
be found infra, Ch. Ill, i, iii. The origin of the peculiar uses of the
number thirteen is a puzzle without satisfactory solution. In the
explanation of Vaticanus A (Kingsborough, vi. 198, note), it is said —
referring to the statement that “Tonacatecotle” presides over the
“thirteen causes” — that “the causes are really only nine, cor-
 NOTES

355

responding in number with the heavens. But since four of them
are reckoned twice in every series of thirteen days, in order that
each day might be placed under some peculiar influence, they are
said to be thirteen.” This, however, is probably assuming effect for
cause (cf. Ch. Ill, iii).

8.   Sahagun, VI. xxxii. Other references to Sahagun are, III, Ap-
pendix i; X. xxi.

9.   Seler , p. 31; [c], pp. 5, 10, 14.

10.   Seler [c], pp. 5-31, where he discusses the whole problem of
cruciform and caryatid figures; as also in [e], ii., 107, 126-34; [d], pp.
76-93-

11.   Seler [a], index, s. vv., is a guide to the manifold attributes of
the Aztec gods. The most important myths concerning them are
related by Sahagun, bk. iii, and by the authorities cited with respect
to cosmogonies, infra, Ch. Ill, i, ii.

12.   See especially Seler [a], ii, “Die Ausgrabungen am Orte des
Haupttempels in Mexico”; [c], p. 112; Sahagun, III. i; Tratado de los
Ritos, etc. (see Tobar, in Bibliography); Robelo [a],x. v.; and Charency,
UOrigine de la legende d1 Huitzilopochtli (Paris, 1897); cf. also infra,
Ch. Ill, v. The story of Tlahuicol is given by Clavigero, V. vi.

13.   See Seler , p. 60; [c], pp. 33, 205; [d], pp.^77, 95-96; index.
The prayers quoted are in Sahagun, VI. i, iv, v, vi; while the
famous sacrifice is described in II. v, xxiv (also by Torquemada,
VII. xix and X. xiv; and picturesquely by Prescott, I. iii). The
myths are in Sahagun, III. iv ff.; a version with a different list of
magicians (Ihuimecatl and Toltecatl are the companions of Tezcatli-
poca) is given by Ramirez, Anales de Cuauhtitlan, pp. 17-18.

14.   See Seler, indexes, and the picturesque and romantic treat-
ment by Brasseur de Bourbourg [a], iii. The more striking early
sources are Sahagun, III. iii-xv; VI. vii, xxv (quoted), xxxiv
(quoted); IX. xxix; X. iii, iv; Ixtlilxochitl, Historia Chichimeca,

I.   i, ii; Anales de Cuauhtitlan, pp. 17-23; Mendieta, II. v; and
Explicacion del Codex Telleriano-Remensis (Kingsborough, v). For
later discussions see Leon de Rosny, “Le Mythe de Quetzalcoatl,” in
Archives de la socike des americanistes de France (Paris, 1878); Seler

[a]   , iii, “Ueber die naturlichen Grundlagen mexikanischer Mythen”;

   , pp. 41-48 (p. 45 here quoted); and Joyce , pp. 46-51. Dupli-
cates or analogues of Quetzalcoatl are described in Mythology of All
Races, Boston, 1916, x, Ch. IX, iii, v; Ch. XI, ii (p. 243); and infra,
Ch. IV, ii; Ch. V, iv; Ch. VI, iv; Ch. VII, iv; Ch. VIII, ii.

15.   For Tlaloc see especially Seler [a], iii. 100-03; , pp. 62-67;
Sahagun, I. iv, xxi; II. i, iii, xx (quoted), and Appendix, where is
given the description of the curious octennial festival in which the
rain-gods were honoured with a dance at which live frogs and snakes
 LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

356

were eaten; the feast was accompanied by a fast viewed as a means
of permitting the deities to resuscitate their food-creating energies,
which were regarded as overworked or exhausted by their eight years’
labour. See also Historia de los Mexicanos por sus Pinturas, chh. ii,
vi; and Hamy . References to Chalchiuhtlicue will be found
in Seler [a], index; , pp. 56-58; etc. The ritual prayer is recorded
by Sahagun, VI. xxxii.

16.   Sahagun, bk. i; Seler [a], index; and Robelo [a], are guides to
the analysis and grouping of the Aztec deities.

17.   See Seler [d], pp. 130-131.

18.   Seler [a], ii. 1071-78, and CA xiii. 171-74 (hymn to Xipe Totec,
here freely rendered). See, also, Seler , pp. 100-104, and [a], ii,
“Die religiosen Gesange der alten Mexikaner” (cf. Brinton [d], [e]),
where a number of deities are characterized by translations and
studies of hymns preserved in a Sahagun MS. A description of the
Pawnee form of the arrow sacrifice will be found in Mythology of All
Races, Boston, 1916, x. 76 (with plate), and Note 58. The Aztec
form is pictured in Codex Nuttall, No. 83, as is also the famous
sacrificio gladiatorio (as the Spaniards called it), of which Duran,
Album, gives several drawings. The sacrificio gladiatorio was appar-
ently in some rites a first stage leading to the arrow sacrifice (see
Seler [e], i. 170-73, where several figures are reproduced).

19.   Tonacatecutli is treated by Seler [d], pp. 130 ff. See also,
supra, Ch. II, .iii; infra, Ch. Ill, i.

20.   Seler [d], p. 133; and for discussion of Xochiquetzal, Seler ,
pp. 118-24.

21.   Sahagun, I. vi, xii. Seler , pp. 92-100, discusses Tlazolteotl,
on p. 93 giving the story of the sacrifice of the Huastec, taken from
Ramirez, Anales, pp. 25-26.

22.   The conception of sacrifice as instituted to keep the world
vivified, and especially to preserve the life of the Sun, appears in a
number of documents, particularly in connexion with cosmogony
(see Ch. Ill, i, ii), as Sahagun, III, Appendix, iv; VI. iii; VII. ii;
Explication del Codex Telleriano-Remensis (Kingsborough, v. 135);
and especially in the Historia de los Mexicanos por sus Pinturas; see
also Payne, i. 577-82; Seler [a], iii. 285; , pp. 37-41; “Die Sage von
Quetzalcouatl,” in CA xvi (Vienna, 1910).

23.   Sahagun, III, Appendix, i (quoted); cf. Seler , pp. 82-86.
See also Sahagun, loc. cit., ch. ii, for a description of Tlalocan, and
ch. iii. for a description of the celestial paradise (cf. I. x and VI. xxix).

24.   The meaning of Tamoanchan is discussed by Preuss, “Feuer-
gotter,” who regards it as an underworld region; by Beyer, in Anthro-
pos, iii, who explains it as the Milky Way; and by Seler [a], ii, “Die
religiosen Gesange der alten Mexikaner,” and [e] (see index), who
 NOTES

357

identifies it with the western region, the house of the evening sun.
Xolotl is discussed, in the same connexions, by Seler; see especially
, pp. 108-12. The myth from Sahagun is in VII. ii; those from
Mendieta in II. i, ii.

25.   The limbo of children’s souls is described in the Spiegazione
delle tavole del Codice Mexicano (here quoting Kingsborough, vi. 171).

Chapter III

1.   Mexican cosmogonies are discussed by Robelo [a], art. “Cos-
mogonia,” in AnMM, 2a epoca, iii; Bancroft, III. ii (full biblio-
graphical notes); R. H. Lowie, art. “Cosmogony and Cosmology
(Mexican and South American),” in ERE; Bruhl, pp. 398-401;
Brinton [a], vii; Charency [a]; Muller, pp. 510—12; Spence , iii.
A literary version of some of the old cosmogonic stories is given by
Castellanos .

2.   Herrera, III. iii. 10 (quoted by Leon, in AnMM, 2a epoca, i.

395)-

3.   Mixtec and Zapotec myth are studied by Seler, 28 BBE, pp.
285-305 (pp. 289, 286 are here quoted); the source cited for the Mixtec
myth is Gregorio Garcia, Origen de los Indios, V. iv; for Zapotec,
Juan de Cordoba, Arte del Idioma Zapoteca.

4.   Sahagun, VI. vii, with reference to the Chichimec (elsewhere
he speaks of Mixcoatl as an Otomian god); X. xxix. I, with reference
to the Toltec; III. i, ii, and VII. ii, with reference to the origin of
the sun, etc.

5.   Seler , p. 38.

6.   Mendieta (after Fray Andres de Olmos), II. i-iv,

7.   The fullest versions of the Mexican cosmic ages, or “Suns,” are:
(a) Ixtlilxochitl (Historia Chichimeca, I. i; Relaciones, ed. Kings-
borough, ix. 321 ff., 459); (b) Historia de los Mexicanos por sus Pin-
turas, i-viii — the narrative which most resembles a primitive
myth; (c) Anales de Cuauhtitlan (ed. Ramirez, pp. 9-11), partly
translated into French by Brasseur de Bourbourg [a], i. Appendice,
pp. 425-27, where the version of the deluge myth is given; (d) Spie-
gazione delle tavole del Codice Mexicano (i. e. Codex Vaticanus A),
where Plates VII-X are described as symbols of the Suns; though a
discordant explanation is given in connexion with Plate V. Other
authorities are Gomara , p. 431; Munoz Camargo, p. 132; Hum-
boldt [a], ii, Plate XXVI; and especially Charency [a], who makes a
comparative study of the myth. Monumental evidences are discussed
by Seler [a], ii, “ Die Ausgrabungen am Orte des Haupttempels in Mex-
ico,” and by MacCurdy [a]. Maya forms of the myth are sketched
infra, pp. 153-55; cf- PP- *59 ff-
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358

8.   The Spiegazione contains the description of the deluge (Kings-
borough, vi. 195-96), chiefly in connexion with Plate XVI. Similar
material, briefly treated, is in the Explication del Codex Telleriano-
Remensis.

9.   The literature dealing with the Mexican calendar is voluminous.
Summary treatments of the subject, based on recent studies, are to
be found in Beuchat, II. i. 5; Joyce , iii.; Preuss, art. “Calendar
(Mexican and Mayan),” in ERE. The primary sources for knowledge
of the calendar are three: (1) writings of the early chroniclers, among
whom the most noteworthy are Sahagun, books ii, iv, vii, and Leon
y Gama, who derives in part from Cristobal del Castillo; (2) calendric
codices, the more important being Codex Borgia, studied by Fabrega,
in AnMM v, and by Seler [a], i, and [e]; Codex Borbonicus, studied
by Hamy [a], and de Jonghe; Codex Vaticanus B (3773), studied by
Seler [d]; Codex Fejervary-Mayer, studied by Seler [c]; Codex Bologna
(or Cospianus), studied by Seler [a], i; Codex Nuttall, studied by
Nuttall; and the Tonalamatl of the Aubin Collection, studied by Seler
; (3) monuments, especially calendar stones: Leon y Gama, Dos
Piedras; Chavero [a]; MacCurdy [a]; and Robelo are studies of
such monuments. Recent investigations of importance, in addition
to papers by Seler ([a] and elsewhere), are Z. Nuttall, “The Periodical
Adjustments of the Ancient Mexican Calendar,” in A A, new series,
vi (1904), and Preuss, “Kosmische Hieroglyphen der Mexikaner,”
in ZE xxxiii (1901). Studies of the Maya calendar (especially the
important contributions of Forstemann, in 28 BBE) and of that of
the Zapotec (Seler, “The Mexican Chronology, with Special Refer-
ence to the Zapotec Calendar,” ib.) are, of course, intimately related
to the Aztec system. For statement of current problems, see Leh-
mann [a], pp. 164-66.

10.   For Mexican astronomy, in addition to the studies of the
codices, see Sahagun, bk. vii; Tezozomoc, lxxxii; Seler, 28BBE, “The
Venus Period in the Picture Writings of the Borgian Codex Group”
(tr. from art. in Berliner Gesellschaft fur Anthropologie, Ethnologie und
Urgeschichte, 1898); Hagar [a], ; Chavero ; and Nuttall [a],
especially pp. 245-59. On the question of the zodiac, advocated by
Hagar, see H. J. Spinden, “The Question of the Zodiac in America,”
in AA, new series, xviii (1916), and the bibliography there given.

11.   Accounts of the archaeology of Tollan, or Tula, are to be found
in Charnay [a], iv-vi, and in Joyce , especially in the Appendix.
Sahagun’s description of the Toltec is in X. xxix. 1. The Spiegazione
of Codex Vaticanus A, Plate X, gives interesting additions (here
quoted from Kingsborough, vi. 178). The chief authority, however,
is Ixtlilxochitl, whose accounts of the Toltec, Chichimec, and espe-
cially Tezcucan powers have frequently been regarded with sus-
 NOTES

359

picion, as coloured by too free a fancy. Nevertheless, as Lehmann
points out ([a], p. 121), it is certain that Ixtlilxochitl had at his com-
mand sources now lost. Much of his material is clearly in a native
vein, and there is no impossibility that it is a version of history which
is only slightly exalted.

12.   Spanish and French versions of the elegy of Nezahualcoyotl
(here rather freely adapted) are in TC xiv. 368-73.

13.   The Aztec migration is a conspicuous feature of native tradi-
tion, and is, therefore, prominent in the histories, being figured by
several of the codices, as well as in Duran’s Album. An early narra-
tion of the Aztec myth forms chh. ix ff. of the Historia de los Mexi-
canos por sus Pinturas, while the Historia de los Reynos de Colhuacan
y de Mexico, the narrative of the “Anonimo Mexicano,” and Tezo-
zomoc, i-iii, give other native versions. Mendieta, Sahagun, and
Duran, are other sources for the myth. Seler [a], ii, “Wo lag Aztlan,
die Heimat der Azteken?” gives a careful study of the mythical ele-
ments in the migration-story as displayed in the Codex Boturini and
elsewhere. Orozco y Berra [a], iv, presents a comparative study of
the Aztec rulers, drawn from the various accounts. Buelna’s Pere-
grinacion is generally regarded as the completest study of the migra-
tion from both legendary and archaeological evidence. Brasseur de
Bourbourg [a], VI. iv, contains an account of the Aztlan myth, while
VII sketches the development of Nahuatlan power in Tezcuco and
Mexico; in ii. 598-602, the Abbe gives his chronological restoration
of the history of Anahuac. Motezuma’s Corona Mexicana should be
mentioned as a partly native source for the records of the Aztec
monarchs; while Chimalpahin represents not only a native record,
but one composed in the native tongue.

14.   Mendieta, II. xxxiii-xxxiv.

15.   Sahagun, X. xxix. 12.

16.   Best known is the Codex Boturini (reproduced in Kings-
borough, i; see also Garcia Cubas , where Codex Boturini is com-
pared with a supplementary historical painting; interesting repro-
ductions of related Acolhua paintings, the “Mappe Tlotzin” and the
“Mappe Quinatzin,” are in Aubin [a]).

17.   Duran, xxvii.

18.   Accounts of the portents that preceded the coming of Cortez
are conspicuous in nearly all the early narratives; among them
Acosta, VI. xxii; Clavigero, V. xii, etc.; Chimalpahin, “Septieme
relation”; Duran, lxi, lxiii, etc.; Ixtlilxochitl, Historia Chichimeca,
II. lxxii; Sahagun, XII. i; Tezozomoc, xcvii; Torquemada, III. xci.

19.   The Papago myth is given by Bancroft, III. ii (after Davidson,
Report on Indian Affairs [Washington, 1865], pp. 131—33); cf. Lum-
holtz [c], p. 42.
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360

20.   For identification of the Nicaraguan divinities (originally
described by Oviedo) see Seler [a], ii. 1029-30. Phases of contem-
porary pagan myth in Mexico are treated by Lumholtz (passim),
Preuss, Mechling [a], Mason, and Radin. Interesting ritualistic anal-
ogies are suggested by Fewkes, Evans, Genin, Nuttall, and Preuss.

21.   Preuss [a], , and Lumholtz , I. xxix.

22.   Preuss, “Die magische Denkweise der Cora-Indianer,” in CA
xviii (London, 1913), pp. 129-34.

23.   Seler [a], iii. 376, regards the Huichol Tamats as the Morning
Star, which is certainly plausible in view of his similarity to Chuvalete
of the Cora. Huichol myth and deities are described by Lumholtz
[a], ii (p. 12 here quoted); , II. ix; cf., also, Preuss.

24.   Lumholtz , i. 356.

Chapter IV

1.   The physiography and ethnography of the Maya region are
summarized in Spinden [a]; Beuchat, II, ii; and in Joyce , ch. viii.
Wissler, The American Indian in this, as in other fields, most effec-
tively presents the relations — ethnical, cultural, historical — to the
other American groups. Recent special studies of importance are
Tozzer [a]; Starr, In Indian Mexico, etc.; Sapper ; and the more
distinctively archaeological studies of Holmes, Morley, Spinden, and
others.

2.   It is unfortunate that the region of Maya culture was the sub-
ject of no such full reports, dating from the immediate post-Conquest
period, as we possess from Mexico. The more important of the
Spanish writers who deal with the Yucatec centres are Aguilar,
Cogolludo, Las Casas, Landa, Lizana, Nunez de la Vega, Ordonez y
Aguiar, Pio Perez, Pedro Ponce, and Villagutierre, with Landa easily
first in significance. The histories of Eligio Ancona and of Carrillo y
Ancona are the leading Spanish works of later date. Native writings
are represented by three hieroglyphic pre-Cortezian codices, namely,
Codex Dresdensis, Codex Tro-Cortesianus, and Codex Peresianus,
as well as by the important Books of Chilam Balam and the Chronicle
of Nakuk Pech from the early Spanish period (for description of
thirteen manuscripts and bibliography of published works relating
to their interpretation, see Tozzer, “The Chilam Balam Books,” in
CA xix [Washington, 1917]). Yet what Mayan civilization lacks in
the way of literary monuments is more than compensated by the
remains of its art and architecture, to which an immense amount of
shrewd study has been devoted. The more conspicuous names of
those who have advanced this study are mentioned in connexion with
the literature of the Maya calendar, Note 22, infra. The region has
 NOTES

361

been explored archaeologically with great care, the magnificent re-
ports of Maudsley (in Biologia Centrali-Americana) and of the Pea-
body Museum expeditions {Memoirs), prepared by Gordon, Maler,
Thompson, and others, being the collections of eminence. Brasseur
de Bourbourg can scarcely be mentioned too often in connexion with
this field. His fault is that of Euhemerus, but he is neither the first nor
the last of the tribe of this sage; while for his virtues, he shows more
constructive imagination than any other Americanist: probably the
picture which he presents would be less criticized were it less vivid.

3.   Landa, chh. v-xi (vi, ix, being here quoted).

4.   The sources for the history of the Maya are primarily the native
chronicles (the Books of Chilam Balani), the Relaciones de Yucatan,
and the histories of Cogolludo, Landa, Lizana, and Villagutierre.
The deciphering of the monumental dates of the southern centres
has furnished an additional group of facts, the correlation of which
to the history of the north has become a special problem, with its own
literature. The most important attempts to synchronize Maya dates
with the years of our era are by Pio Perez (reproduced both by
Stephens and by Brasseur de Bourbourg ); Seler [a], i, “ Bedeu-
tung des Maya-Kalenders fur die historische Chronologie”; Good-
man [a], ; Bowditch [a]; Spinden [a], pp. 130-35; (with chart);
Joyce , Appendix iii (with chart); and Morley [a], , [c] and [d],
Bowditch, Spinden, Joyce, and Morley are not radically divergent
and may be regarded as representing the conservative view — here
accepted as obviously the plausible one. Carrillo y Ancona, ch. ii,
analyzes some of the earlier opinions; while the first part of Ancona’s
Historia de Yucatan is devoted to ancient Yucatec history and is
doubtless the best general work on the subject.

5.   Brinton [f], p. 100 (“Introduction” to the Book of Chilan Balam
of Manx).

6.   Spinden ; Joyce , ch. viii. But cf. Morley’s chronological
scheme, infra; and Spinden [a], pp. 130-35.

[Prometheus]

7.   Morley [c], ch. i.

8.   Morley , p. 140. In this connection (p. 144) Morley sum-
marizes the various speculations as to the causes which led to the
abandonment of the southern centres, as reduction of the land by
primitive agricultural methods (Cook), climatic changes (Hunting-
ton), physical, moral and political decadence (Spinden). He adds:
“Probably the decline of civilization in the south was not due to any
one of these factors operating singly, but to a combination of adverse
influences, before which the Maya finally gave way.”

9.   The culture heroes of Maya myth have taken possession of
the imaginations of the Spanish chroniclers, and indeed of not a few
later commentators, rather as clues to native history than to myth-
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362

ology. Bancroft, iii. 450-55, 461-67, summarizes the materials from
Spanish sources; which is treated also, from the point of view of
possible historical elucidation, by Ancona, I. iii; Carrillo y Ancona,
ii, iii; Comte de Charency ; Garcia Cubas, in SocAA xxx, nos.
3-6; and Santibanez, in CA xvii. 2.

10.   The primary sources for the Votan stories are Cogolludo,
Ordonez y Aguiar, and Nunez de la Vega, whose narratives are
liberally summarized by Brasseur de Bourbourg [a], I. i, ii (pp.
68-72 containing the passages from Ordonez here quoted).

11.   For Zamna (or Itzamna) the sources are Cogolludo, Landa,
and Lizana, summarized by Brasseur de Bourbourg [a], I. pp. 76-80.
Quotations are here made from Cogolludo, IV. iii, vi; Brasseur de
Bourbourg [f], ii, “Vocabulaire generate ”; and Lizana (ed. Brasseur
de Bourbourg), pp. 356-59; cf. also Seler [a], index; Landa, chh.
xxxv, xxxvi.

12.   Identifications of images of Itzamna and Kukulcan are dis-
cussed by Dieseldorff, in ZE xxvii. 770-83; Spinden [a], pp. 60-70:
Joyce , ch. ix, and Morley [c], pp. 16-19.

13.   Cogolludo, Landa, and Lizana are the chief sources for the
Kukulcan stories, — especially Landa, chh. vi, xl, being here quoted.
Tozzer [a], p. 96, is quoted; cf., for Yucatec survival, p. 157.

14.   Citations from Landa in this section are from chh. xxvii, xl
(which records the new year’s festivals), xxxiii (describing the future
world), and xxxiv. Landa is our chief source for knowledge of the
Yucatec rites and of the deities associated with them; additional or
corroborative details being furnished by Aguilar, Cogolludo, Lizana,
Las Casas, Ponce, and Pio Perez.

15.   Interpretations of the names of the Maya deities, as here
given, are from Brasseur de Bourbourg [f], ii, “Vocabulaire”; and
Seler [a], index.

16.   Lizana (ed. Brasseur de Bourbourg), pp. 360-61.

17.   Schellhas gives his identifications and descriptions of the
gods of the codices; additional materials are contained in Fewkes
; Forstemann ; Joyce , ch. ix; Morley [c], pp. 16-19; Spinden
, pp. 60-70; and Bancroft, iii, ch. xi.

18.   Tozzer [a], pp. 150 if.; also, for the Lacandones, pp. 93-99.
The names of the deities, Maya and Lacandone, are here in several
cases altered slightly from the form in which Tozzer gives them, for
the sake of avoiding the use of unfamiliar phonetic symbols; the
result is, of course, phonetic approximation only.

19.   Landa, chh. xxvi, xxvii.

20.   Las Casas , ch. cxxiii.

21.   Landa, ch. xxxiv. In chh. iii, xxxii, he gives information in
Tegard to the goddess Ixchel.
 NOTES

363

22.   The literature of the Maya calendar system is, of course, inti-
mately connected with that of the Mexican (see Note 9, Chapter III).
The native sources for its study are the Codices and the monumental
inscriptions, while of early Spanish expositions the most important
are those of Landa and Pio Perez. In recent times a considerable body
of scholars have devoted special attention to the Maya inscriptions
and to the elucidation of the calendar, foremost among them being,
in America, Ancona, Bowditch, Chavero, Goodman, Morley, Spinden,
Cyrus Thomas, and in Europe, Brasseur de Bourbourg, Forstemann,
Rosny, and Seler. The foundation of the elucidation of Maya as-
tronomical knowledge is Forstemann’s studies of the Dresden Codex,
while the study of mythic elements associated with the calendar is
represented by Charency, especially “Des ages ou soleils d’apres la
mythologie des peuples de la Nouvelle Espagne,” section ii, in CA
iv. 2; and by J. H. Martinez, “Los Grandes Ciclos de la historia
Maya,” in CA xvii. 2. Summary accounts of the Maya calendar are
to be found in Spinden [a], Beuchat, Joyce , Arnold, and Frost,
while Bowditch and Morley [c] are in the nature of text-book
introductions to the subject.

23.   Morley [d], “The Hotun,” in CA xix (Washington, 1917).

24.   Morley [c], p. 32.

25.   Tozzer [a], pp. 153-54.

26.   J. Martinez Hernandez, “La Creacion del Mundo segun los
Mayas,” in CA xviii (London, 1913), pp. 164-71. Senor Hernandez
notes that the tense of the verb in the first sentence of the myth is
for the sake of literal translation.

Chapter V

1.   For ethnic analysis Thomas and Swanton is followed here and
throughout the chapter. Of the earlier Spanish authors Las Casas
(especially , chh. cxxii-cxxv, clxxx, ccxxxiv ff.) is the most
weighty. See also Morley [e], “The Rise and Fall of the Maya Civil-
izations,” in CA xix (Washington, 1917).

2.   Brinton [h], p. 69.

3.   ib. p. 149.

4.   Brasseur de Bourbourg [a], pp. lxxx-lxxxiii.

5.   The Popul Vuh, described by Brasseur de Bourbourg in his
Histoire du Mexique under the title Manuscrit Quiche de Chichi-
castenango ([a], i. pp. lxxx ff.), is a Quiche document, part myth and
part legendary history, supposed to have been put in writing in the
seventeenth century, when it was copied and translated into Spanish
by Francisco Ximenes, of the Order of Predicadores. The manu-
script was found by C. Scherzer in 1855 in the library of the uni-
 LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

364

versity of San Carlos, Guatemala. The Spanish text of Ximenes was
published at Vienna in 1856, and again, with French translation and
notes, by Brasseur de Bourbourg, Paris, 1861; a second Spanish ver-
sion, by Barberena, appeared in San Salvador, 1905. None of these
translations is regarded as accurate, or indeed as other than filled
with error and misinterpretation; but pending the appearance of a
scholarly rendering from the native text they are our only sources
for a document of profound interest. The edition of Brasseur de
Bourbourg is that here employed, translations being from parts i, ii,
and iii, while interpretations of names are drawn chiefly from Bras-
seur’s footnotes. Las Casas , ch. cxxiv, contains some account
of the gods and heroes mentioned in the Popul Vuh.

6.   For discussion of the bat-god, Zotz, see Seler, 28 BBE, pp.
231 ff., “The Bat God of the Maya Race”; also, Dieseldorff, ib., p.
665, “A Clay Vessel with a Picture of a Vampire-headed Deity”;
cf. Giglioli, CA xvi (Vienna and Leipzig, 1910).

7. The Manuscrit Cakchiquel, or Memorial de Tecpan-Atitlan, as
he calls it, was given to Brasseur de Bourbourg by Juan Gavarrete,
of the Convent of Franciscans of Guatemala. Its author, says the
Abbe ([a], i. p. lxxxiii) was Don Francisco Ernandez Arana Xahila, of
the Princes Ahpotzotziles of Guatemala, grandson of King Hunyg,
who died of the plague, five years before the Spaniards set foot in
this country, in 1519. The manuscript was brought down to 1582 by
this author, and thence carried forward to 1597 by Don Francisco
Diaz Gebuta Queh, of the same family. Brinton published his trans-
lation under the title, The Annals of the Cakchiquels, in Philadelphia,
1885, and the work now commonly is referred to under this name.
It is Brinton’s version which is here followed, with some inconse-
quential alterations of phraseology. In his introduction Brinton
gives (pp. 39-48) interesting comments on the “Religious Notions.”

8.   Brinton [h], pp. 25-26.

9.   ib. p. 14.

10.   Of works dealing with the religious beliefs of the natives of
Honduras and Nicaragua, the writings of Oviedo and of Las Casas
(especially , ch. clxxx) are the most important of early date.
Among works of later date Squier’s books are of the first significance.
Bancroft, iii, ch. xi, gives a summary of most that is known of the
myths of this region; Brasseur de Bourbourg [a], livre v, ch. iii,
livre viii, ch. iv, contains additional materials. The archaeology is
described by Squier [a], , [c], passim; Joyce [a], part i; Brinton [h],
introduction; and, with ethnological analysis, Lehmann [c].

11.   Brasseur de Bourbourg [a], ii. p. 556. The Mictlan myth is
given, ib. p. 105.

12.   Oviedo, TC xiv, p. 133.
 NOTES

36s

13.   Lehmann [c], p. 717.

14.   See Lehmann [c], pp. 715-16.

Chapter VI

1.   The ethnology of the Andean region is treated by Joyce [c],
Wissler, The American Indian, and Beuchat, II. iv. Bastian, Cultur-
lander, and Payne, History, give more extended views; while tribal
distribution in its cultural relations is probably best presented by
Schmidt, in ZE xlv. Spinden, “The Origin and Distribution of
Agriculture in America,” and Means, “An Outline of the Culture-
Sequence in the Andean Area,” both in CA xix (Washington, 1917),
are significant contributions to the problem of origins and history;
with these should be placed, “Origenes Etnograficos de Colombia,”
by Carlos Cuervo Marquez, in the Proceedings of the Second Pan
American Scientific Congress, i (Washington, 1917). Spinden con-
ceives an archaic American culture, probably originating in Mexico
and thence spreading north and south, which was based upon agri-
culture and characterized by the use of pottery, textiles, etc., and
which, in the course of time, made its influence felt from the mouth
of the St. Lawrence to that of La Plata. This hypothesis admirably
accounts for the obvious affinities of the civilizations of the two
continents.

2.   The linguistic and cultural affinities of the Isthmian tribes are
described by Wissler, Beuchat, Joyce [c], and Thomas and Swanton;
and on the archaeological side especially by Hartman [a], , and
Holmes [c], [d]. For the broader analogies of the Central American,
North Andean, and Antillean regions see also Saville, Cuervo Mar-
quez, and Spinden’s article mentioned in Note I, supra. Spinden,
Maya Art (MPM), argues against the conception of extensive bor-
rowing. Of the earlier authorities for this region, the important are
Peter Martyr, Benzoni, Oviedo, Herrera, and Las Casas. Among
writers of later times, Humboldt holds first place.

3.   Oviedo (TC), pp. 211-22. Other references in this paragraph
are: Benzoni (HS), ii; Andagoya (HS), pp. 14-15; Cieza de Leon
(HS), 1864, ch. viii.

4.   Peter Martyr, 1912, ii (pp. 319, 326 quoted).

5.   Gabb, pp. 503-06; Pittier de Fabrega , pp. 1-9; Las Casas
, ch. cxxv.

6.   The most recent work, summarizing the legend of El Dorado,
is Zahm ; and the earliest versions of the tale are those of Simon,
Fresle, Piedrahita, Cavarjal, and Castellanos, the latter of whom
incorporated the story in his poetical Elejias de Varones Ilustres de
Indias, which was printed at Madrid, in 1850. Critical accounts, in
addition to Zahm, are Bollaert’s “Introduction” to Simon’s Expedi-
 LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

366

tion of Pedro de Ursua (Spanish in Serrano y Sanz, Historiadores de
Indias, ii) and in Bandelier’s The Gilded Man. On the historical side,
especially as regards the period of the Conquest, Andagoya, Cas-
tellanos, Carvajal, Fresle, Simon, give unforgettable pictures of the
adventurous extravagance and bizarrerie of a time scarcely to be
paralleled in human annals. Father Zahm’s Quest of El Dorado is an
inviting introduction to this literature.

7.   For Chibchan ethnology and archaeology, see Joyce [c], Acosta
de Samper, and Cuervo Marquez.

8.   Cieza de Leon (HS), 1864, pp. 59, 88, 101.

9.   The primary sources for the mythology of the Chibchan tribes
at the time of the Conquest are Pedro Simon, Lucas Fernandez
Piedrahita (especially I, iii, iv), and Cieza de Leon. Simon’s “Cuarta
Noticia,” in eighteen chapters, is the fullest exposition of Chibcha
beliefs and history; along with the “Tercera Noticia” it is printed
in Kingsborough, viii, which is here cited (pp. 244, 263-64 quoted).
Other authorities include Humboldt, Joyce [c], chh. i, ii; Acosta de
Samper, ch. viii; Sir Clements Markham, art. “Andeans,” in ERE;
and Beuchat, pp. 549-50. On the deluge myth see also Bandelier [c].

10.   The story of the giants is given by Cieza de Leon [a], ch. Iii;
see also Velasco, p. 12; Bandelier , where the literature of the sub-
ject is assembled; and Saville, 1907, p. 9. The archaeology of the
region, with numerous plates, is presented in Saville’s reports; ii.
88-123 (1910) contains a description and discussion of the stone
seats; while brief accounts are to be found in Beuchat and in Joyce [c].

11.   Velasco is the chief authority for the career of the people of
Cara. The discoveries of Dorsey on the island of La Plata give an
added significance to these tales of men from the sea.

12.   Balboa (TC), ch. vii; cf. Joyce [c], ch. iii.

Chapter VII

I. The history and archaeology of aboriginal Peru is summarized
by Markham, The Incas of Peru (1910), to which his notes and in-
troductions to his many translations of Spanish works, published by
the Hakluyt Society, form a varied supplementation. Among earlier
authorities E. G. Squier, Travel and Exploration in the Land of the In-
cas (1877), and Castelnau, Expedition (1850-52), are eminent; while
of later authorities the more conspicuous are: for Inca monuments,
Bingham, of the Yale Expedition, and Baessler; for Tiahuanaco,
Crequi-Montfort, of the Mission scientifique frangaise a Tiahuan-
aco, Bandelier, Gonzalez de la Rosa, Posnansky, Uhle and Stiibel;
for the coastal regions, Baessler, Reiss and Stiibel, Uhle, Tello;
and for the Calchaqui territories, Ambrosetti, Boman, and Lafone
Quevado. General and comparative studies are presented in Wissler,
 NOTES

367

The American Indian; Beuchat, Manuel; Joyce, South American
Archeology; Spinden, Handbook; while a careful effort to restore the
sequences of cultures in Peru is Means, “Outline of the Culture-
Sequence in the Andean Area,” in CA xix (Washington, 1917).

2.   Cieza de Leon [a], ch. xxxvi.

3.   The origin of agriculture in America is regarded by Spinden,
“The Origin and Distribution of Agriculture in America,” CA xix
(Washington, 1917), as probably Mexican. From Mexico it passed
north and south, reaching its limiting areas in the neighbourhoods of
the St. Lawrence and of La Plata. Cf. Wissler, The American Indian.

4.   Montesinos’s lists are analyzed by Markham [a]. See, also,
Means; cf. Pietschmann.

5.   Uhle, especially [a], [c], and art., CA xviii (London, 1913), “Die
Muschelhugel von Ancon, Peru”; Bingham , [c].

6.   Means, CA xix (Washington, 1917), p. 237, gives as the general
chronological background of Peruvian culture:

1-circa 200 b.c.
circa 20ob.c.-6ooa.d.
“   600-1100 A. D.

“   1100-1530 A.D.

Preliminary migrations.
Megalithic Empire.
Tampu-Tocco Period, decadence.
Inca Empire.

He also gives in the same article, p. 241, a most interesting com-
parative restoration of the chronologies of the sequence of culture in
the several Peruvian and Mexican centres, namely:

©»•

r*

•               1     OLD MAY,   • -  \ EMPIRE   •         
Archaic   period |Mi   Idle Great-                  
NEW MA>   A EMPIRE   Colonization      Transi   rional   League of Mayapan   Nahua pe Pecaden   riod; ze
                        
QUITO (E<   uador)   The Qt      itu      The   Cara   a  u  c
                        
TRUJILLO   ^Proto-Ch   iTiahy mu 1 pr      >per° Decad   ent forms of 1   IahuanacoArt   Real Chimu   Inca |
PACHACAM/                        
   tC ?   ? ?   Tiahu  pr<   anacoj De per | Ri:   adence of' e of later   iahuanaco 1 Ve-lnca foi   orms;  ms   Inca
                        
NASCA   Proto-Nas<   a*   Tiahu  pro   tnacol Di >er 1 R   cadence of se of Pre-I   Tiahuanaci ica forms   1 in   ca |
                        
DIAGUITE.   Draconi;   n"   Tiahu   »naco| Oec   idence of 1   ahuanaco.   Calchaqui   Inca |
                        
Tiahuai   aco or Meg   ilifhic      | Tamp   < Tocco per   od | In   :a Empir   1
                        

TABLE DESIGNED TO SHOW THE SEQUENCE OP ABORIGINAL AMERICAN CULTURES AND THEIR
CHRONOLOGIC RELATIONS
 LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

368

7.   For the myths and religion of the coastal peoples of Peru the
important early authorities are Arriaga, Avila, Balboa, Cieza de
Leon, and Garcilasso de la Vega. Markham [a], especially chh. xiv,
xv, is the primary authority here followed. For archaeological de-
tails the authorities are Baessler; Bastian; Joyce [c], ch. viii; Squier
[e]; Tello; Putnam; and Uhle. It is from this coastal region that the
most striking Peruvian pottery comes, the Truxillo and Nasca styles
respectively typifying the Chimu and Chincha groups.

8.   Tello, “Los antiguos cementerios del valle de Nasca,” p. 287,
suggests three criteria by means of which the mythological nature
of such figures is to be inferred: When symbolical attributes are
indicated by the animal’s carrying mystical or thaumaturgical ob-
jects; when the figure retains, through a variety of representations,
certain constant, individualizing traits; and when the same image is
used repeatedly on the more notable types of cultural and artistic
objects. Senor Tello believes Nasca religion to have been totemic in
character.

9.   It is reproduced by Joyce [c], p. 155.

10.   Garcilasso’s accounts of the coastal religion are scattered
through his inchoate work, the more important passages being bk. ii,
ch. iv; bk. vi, chh. xvii, xviii.

11.   Summarized by Markham [a], p. 216.

12.   Summarized by Markham [a], pp. 235-36.

13.   Avila .

14.   Avila’s Narrative in Rites and Laws of the Yncas (HS), 1883,
pp. 121-47, is the authority for the myths given in the text; but
several of the stories appear also in Molina, Salcamayhua, and Sar-
miento, showing that the mythic cycle was widespread, extending
into the highlands as well as along the coast. The people from whom
Avila received his tales were of a tribe that had migrated from the
coast to higher valleys.

15.   The Tiahuanaco monolith is interpreted by Squier [e], ch. xv;
Markham [a], ch. ii; Gonzalez de la Rosa, “Les deux Tiahuanaco,”
CA xvi (1910); and by Posnansky, “El signo escalonado,” CA xviii
(1913). The latter regards the meander design, or its element, the
stair-design in its various forms, as a symbol of the earth; and he
believes Tiahuanaco to be the place of origin of this symbol, whence
it spread northward into Mexico. It is, of course, among the Pueblo
Indians of the United States an earth-symbol. If this be the correct
interpretation, the central figure is the sun, rising or standing above
the earth. Bandelier [e] gives ancient and modern myths in regard
to Titicaca and its environs.

16.   Representations of pottery and other designs from the Dia-
guite region showing the influence of Tiahuanaco and possibly Nasca
 NOTES

369

[Prometheus]

influence are to be found in the publications of Ambrosetti, Boman,
Lafone Quevado and others. Perhaps the most interesting is the
potsherd showing the figure of a deity (?) bearing an axe with a
trident-like handle, while near him is what seems clearly to be a
representation of a thunderbolt; a trophy head is at his girdle.

17.   Markham [a], pp. 41-42. Caparo y Perez, Proceedings of the
Second Pan American Scientific Congress, section i, pp. 121-22, in-
terprets the name “Uirakocha” as composed of uira, “grease,” and
kocha, “sea”; and, since grease is a symbol for richness and the sea
for greatness, it “ signified that which was great and rich.”

18.   Molina (Markham, Rites and Laws), p. 33.

19.   Markham [a], ch. viii; another version is given by Markham
[c]; while the text and Spanish translation are in Lafone Quevado [a].
Cf. the fragments from Huaman Poma given by Pietschmann ,
especially the prayer, p. 512: “Supreme utmost Huiracocha, wherever
thou mayest be, whether in heaven, whether in this world, whether
in the world beneath, whether in the utmost world, Creater of this
world, where thou mayest be, oh, hear me!”

20.   Salcamayhua (Markham, Rites and Laws), pp. 70-72.

21.   Bandelier [d], [e], especially pp. 291-329.

22.   Molina, op. cit.; Cieza de Leon , ch. v, pp. 5-10; Sarmiento,
pp. 27-39; and for summary of the narrative of Huaman Poma,
Pietschmann, CA xviii (London, 1913), pp. 511-12.
 370

LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

23.   Viracocha and Tonapa obviously belong to the group, or chain,
of hero-deities of a like character, extending from Peru to Mexico,
and, in modified forms, far to the north and far to the south of each
of these centres. This personage, as a hero, is a man, bearded, white,
aided by a magic wand or staff, who brings some essential element
of culture and departs; as a god, he is a creator, who appeared after
the barbaric ages of the world and introduced a new age (there are
exceptions to this, as the narrative of Huaman Poma); further, he is a
deity of the heavens, the plumed- or the double-headed serpent is
his emblem, perhaps his incarnation, and he is closely associated
with the sun, which seems to be his servant. Is it not entirely pos-
sible that this interesting mythic complex is historically associated,
in its spread, with the spread of the cultivation of maize at some
early period? In the Navaho representations of Hastsheyalti, the
white god of the east, bearded with pollen, and himself creator and
maize-god, with the Yei as his servants, and his two sons (in the tale
of “The Stricken Twins”) genii respectively of rain (vegetation) and
of animals (see Mythology of All Races, Boston, 1916, x, ch. viii,
sections ii, iv) we have the essential attributes of this deity and at
the same time an image of his probable function, as sky-god asso-
ciated especially with the whiteness of dawn, with rain-giving, and
hence with growing corn. The staff, which is the conspicuous at-
tribute of Tonapa and Bochica in particular, may well bear a double
significance: in the hands of the hero, as the dibble of the maize-
planter; in the hands of the god, as the lightning. In any case, there
are a multitude of analogies, not only in the myths, but also in the
art-motives and symbolisms of the group of tribes which extends from
the Diaguite to the North American Pueblo regions that powerfully
suggest a common origin of the ideas which centre about the cult of
heaven and earth, of descending rain and upspringing maize. Many
partial parallels for the same group of ideas are to be found among
the less advanced tribes of the plains and forest regions of both South
and North America. Possibly, the myth, or at least the rites upon
which it rests, accompanied the knowledge of agriculture into these
regions.

24.   Lafone Quevado [a], p. 378.

25.   Garcilasso de la Vega, bk. i, chh. xv, xvi. The myth is also
given by Acosta, bk. i, ch. xxv; bk. vi, ch. xx; by Sarmiento, chh.
xi-xiv; and by Salcamayhua (Markham,’ Rites and Laws), pp. 74-75.

26.   Garcilasso de la Vega, bk. ii, ch. xviii; bk. viii, ch. viii; cf.
bk. ix, ch. x.

27.   Molina, pp. 11-12.

28.   The Inca pantheon is described by Markham [a], chh. viii,
ix, and by Joyce [c], ch. vii. The primary sources are Garcilasso de
 NOTES

37i

la Vega, Cieza de Leon, Molina, Salcamayhua, and Sarmiento, and
perhaps most important of all Bias Valera, the “Anonymous Jesuit”
whose writings were utilized by various early narrators. Salcamay-
hua’s chart is published by Markham, in a corrected form, in Rites
and Laws of the Yncas, p. 84. The literal reproduction accompanies
Hagar’s discussion of it, CA xii, and it has been several times repro-
duced. Its interpretation is discussed by Hagar, loc. cit.; Spinden,
A A, new series, xviii (1916); Lafone Quevado , and “Los Ojos de
Imaymana,” with a reproduction of the chart which he characterizes
as “the key to Peruvian symbolism”; cf., also, Ambrosetti, CA xix
(Washington, 1913).

29.   The myth of the Ayars is recorded by Sarmiento, x-xiii; it is
discussed by Markham [a], ch. iv, where are the interpretations of
the names adopted in this text.

30.   Cieza de Leon , chh. vi-viii (pp. 13, 16, quoted).

31.   Garcilasso de la Vega, bk. i, ch. xviii.

Chapter VIII

1.   The argument for the antiquity of man in South America rests
mainly upon the discoveries and theories of Ameghino, especially,
La Antigiiedad del hombre en la Plata (2 vols., Buenos Aires and
Paris, 1880) and artt. in AnMB, who is followed by other Argen-
tinian savants. Ales Hrdlicka, Early Man in South America (32
BBE, Washington, 1912), examines the claims made for the sev-
eral discoveries and uniformly rejects the assumption of their great
age, in which opinion he is generally followed by North American
anthropologists; as cf. Wissler, The American Indian (New York,
1917). The theory favored by Hrdlicka and others is of the peopling
of the Americas by successive waves of immigrants from north-
eastern Asia, with possible minor intrusions of Oceanic peoples along
the Pacific coasts of the southern continent.

2.   The sketch of South American ethnography in d’Orbigny’s
L’Homme americain is, of course, now superseded in a multitude of
details; it appears, however, to conform, in broad lines, to the deduc-
tions of later students. In addition to d’Orbigny and Schmidt (ZE
xlv, 1913), Brinton, The American Race, Beuchat, Manuel, and
Wissler, The American Indian, present the most available ethno-
graphic analyses.

3.   “Linguistic Stocks of South American Indians,” in A A, new
series, xv (1913); also, Wissler, The American Indian, pp. 381-85,
listing eighty-four stocks. It must be borne in mind, however, that
the tendency of minute study is eventually to diminish the number of
linguistic stocks having no detectable relationships, and that, in any
 LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

372

case, classifications based upon cultural grade are more important for
the student of mythology than are those based upon language alone.

4.   Brett [a], p. 36; other quotations from this work are from pp.
374, 401, 403.

5.   King Blanco, pp. 63-64. The lack of significant early authorities
for the mythologies of the region of Guiana and the Orinoco (Gumilla
is as important as any) is compensated by the careful work of later
observers of the native tribes, especially of Guiana. Among these,
Humboldt, Sir Richard and Robert H. Schomburgk, and Brett, in
the early and middle years of the nineteenth century, and im Thurn,
at a later period, hold first place, while the contributions of van Coll,
in Anthropos ii, iii (1907, 1908), are no less noteworthy. Latest of
all is Walter Roth’s “Inquiry into the Animism and Folk-Lore of the
Guiana Indians,” in jo ARBE (1915), which, as a careful study of
the myth-literature of a South American group, stands in a class by
itself; it is furnished with a careful bibliography. The reader will
understand that the intimate relation between the Antillean and
Continental Carib (and, to a less extent, Arawakan) ideas brings the
subject-matter of this chapter into direct connexion with that of
Chapter I; while it should also be obvious that the Orinoco region is
only separated from the Amazonian for convenience, and that Chap-
ter X is virtually but a further study of the same level and type of
thought. The bibliographies of Chh. I, VI, and X are supplementary,
for this same region, to that given for Chapter VIII.

6.   Humboldt (Ross), iii. 69; im Thurn, pp. 365-66.

7.   Surely one may indulge a wry smile when told that “heavenly
father” and “creator” are no attributes of God, and may be reason-
ably justified in preferring Sir Richard Schomburgk’s judgment,
where he says (i. 170): “Almost all stocks of British Guiana are one
in their religious convictions, at least in the main; the Creator of the
world and of mankind is an infinitely exalted being, but his energy is
so occupied in ruling and maintaining the earth that he can give no
special care to individual men.” This unusual reason for the in-
difference of the Supreme Being toward the affairs of ordinary men
is probably an inference of the author’s. Roth commences his study
of Guiana Indian beliefs with a chapter entitled, “No Evidence of
Belief in a Supreme Being,” and begins his discussion with the state-
ment: “Careful investigation forces one to the conclusion that, on
the evidence, the native tribes of Guiana had no idea of a Supreme
Being in the modern conception of the term,” quoting evidence, from
Gumilla and others, which to the present writer seems to point in
just the opposite direction. Of course, the phrase “in the modern
conception of the term” is the key to much difference in judgement.
If it means that savages have no conception of a Divine Ens, Esse,
 NOTES

373

Actus Purus, or the like, definable by highly abstract attributes,
ga va sans dire; but if the intention is to say that there is no primitive
belief in a luminous Sky Father, creator and ruler, good on the whole,
though not preoccupied with the small details of earthly and human
affairs, such a conclusion is directly opposed to all evidence, early
and late, North American and South American, missionary and
anthropological. Cf. Mythology of All Races, x, Note 6, and refer-
ences there given; and, in the present volume, not only Ch. I, iii
(Ramon Pane is surely among the earliest), but also — passing over
the numerous allusions in descriptions of the pantheons of the more
advanced tribes (Chh. II-VII) — Ch. IX, iii (early and late for the
low Brazilian tribes); Ch. X, ii, iii, iv.

8.   Sir Richard Schomburgk, ii. 319-20; i. 170-72. Roth gives
legends from many sources touching these deities and others of a
similar character.

9.   Humboldt (Ross), ii. 362.

10.   This tale is translated and abridged from van Coll, in An-
thropos, ii, 682-89; Roth, chh. vii, xviii, affords an excellent com-
mentary.

11.   Brett [a], ch. x, pp. 377-78.

12.   Humboldt (Ross), ii. 182-83, 473-75. Descriptions of the
petroglyphs are to be found in Sir Richard Schomburgk, i. 319-21,
and im Thurn, ch. xix.

13.   Boddam-Whetham, Folk-Lore, v. 317 (im Thurn, p. 376, mis-
quoting Brett, calls this an Arawakan tale); for other creation leg-
ends, see Roth, ch. iv.

14.   Van Coll, Anthropos, iii. 482-86.

15.   Humboldt (Ross), iii. 362-63; other citations from Hum-
boldt in this section are, id. op., iii. 70; ii. 321; iii. 293, 305; ii. 259-60,
in order.

16.   Boddam-Whetham, Folk-Lore, v. 317-21.

17.   Sir Richard Schomburgk, i. 239-41; im Thurn, p. 384. Other
quotations are from Ruiz Blanco, pp. 66-67; Brett [a], pp. 278, 107,
3S6-

18.   For contemporary beliefs about Lope de Aguirre, see Mozans
(J. A. Zahm), [a], pp. 264-67.

Chapter IX

I.   The myth of the Amazons is not only the earliest European
legend to become acclimated in America (cf. Ch. I, ii [with Note 5],
iv; Ch. VIII, iii), it is also one of the most obstinate and recurrent,
and a perennial subject of the interest of commentators. For general
discussions of the question, see Chamberlain, “Recent Literature
 374

LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

on the South American Amazons,” in JAFL xxiv. 16-20 (1911), and
Rothery, The Amazons in Antiquity and Modern Times (London,
1910), which reviews the world-wide scope and forms of the myth,
chh. viii, ix, being devoted to the South American instances. Still
more recent is Whiffen, The Northwest Amazons (New York, 1916),
pp. 239-40.

2.   Markham [e], p. 122. Carvajal is cited in the same work, pp.
34, 26.

3.   Magalhaes de Gandavo, ch. x (TC, pp. 116-17); Schmidel
(Hulsius), ch. xxxiii; Raleigh (in Hakluyt’s Voyages, vol. x), pp.
366-68.

4.   Humboldt (Ross), ii. 395 ff.; iii. 79. Lore pertaining to the
Amazon stone is hardly second to that dealing with the Amazons
themselves. Authorities here cited are La Condamine, pp. 102-113;
Spruce, ii, ch. xxvi (p. 458 quoted); Ehrenreich , especially pp.
64, 65, with references to Barbosa Rodrigues and to Brett . Others
to consult are Rothery, ch. ix; T. Wilson, “Jade in America,” in CA
xii (Paris, 1902); J. E. Pogue, “Aboriginal Use of Turquoise in
North America,” in A A, new series, xiv (1912); and I. B. Moura,
“Sur le progres de l’Amazonie,” in CA xvi (Vienna, 1910).

5.   See Mythology of All Nations, x. 160, 203, 205, 210, and Note 64.

6.   Netto, CA vii (Berlin, 1890), pp. 201 ff.

7.   Acuna (Markham [e]), p. 83. The literature of a region so vast
as that of the basin of the Amazon and the coasts of Brazil is itself
naturally great and scattered. The earlier narratives — such as
those of Acuna, Cardim, Carvajal, Orellana, Ortiguerra, de Lery,
Ulrich Schmidel, and Hans Staden — are valuable chiefly for the
hints which they give of the aboriginal prevalence of ideas studied
with more understanding by later investigators. Among the more
important later writers are d’Orbigny, Couto de Magalhaes, Ehren-
reich, Koch-Griinberg, von den Steinen, Whiffen, and Miller; while
Teschauer’s contributions to Anthropos, i, furnish the best collection
for the Brazilian region as a whole.

8.   Kunike, “Der Fisch als Fruchtbarkeitssymbol,” in Anthropos
vii (1912), especially section vi; Teschauer [a], part i, texts (mainly
derived from Couto de Magalhaes); Tastevin, sections iii, vi; Gar-
cilasso de la Vega, bk. i, chh. ix, x (quoted).

9.   Cook, p. 385; cf. Whiffen, chh. xv, xvi, xviii; and von den
Steinen , pp. 239-41.

10.   Whiffen, pp. 385-86. The myths of manioc and other vegeta-
tion are from Teschauer [a], p. 743; Couto de Magalhaes, ii. 134-35;
Whiffen, loc. cit.; and Koch-Griinberg [a], ii. 292-93.

11.   The legends of St. Thomas are discussed by Granada, ch. xv,
especially pp. 210-15 (cf. also, ch. xx, “Origen mitico y excelencias
 NOTES

375

del urutau,” with accounts of the vegetation-spirit Neambiu). The
suggested relationship of Brazilian and Peruvian myth is considered
by Lafone Quevado in RevMP iii. 332-36; cf, also, Wissler, The
American Indian, pp. 198-99. It may be worth noting that there is a
group of South American names of mythic heroes or deities which
might, in one form or another, suggest or be confounded with Tomas,
among them the Guarani Tamoi (same as Tupan, and perhaps re-
lated to Tonapa), the Tupi Zume. The legend has been discussed in
the present work in Ch. VII, iv.

12.   Koch-Griinberg [a], ii. 173—34; f°r details regarding the use of
masks and mask-dances, see also Whiffen; Tastevin; M. Schmidt,
ch. xiv; Cook, ch. xxiii; Spruce, ch. xxv; von den Steinen ; and
Stradelli.

13.   Cardim (Purchas, xvi), pp. 419-20; Thevet , pp. 136-39;
Keane, p. 209; Ehrenreich [c], p. 34; Hans Staden , ch. xxii.

14.   Fric and Radin, p. 391; Ignace, pp. 952-53; von Rosen, pp.
656-67; Pierini, pp. 703 ff.

15* D’Orbigny, vii, ch. xxxi, pp. 12-24; iv, 109-15; cf. also pp.
265, 296-99, 337, 502-10.

16.   Whiffen, ch. xvii (p. 218 quoted); Church, p. 235. The subject
here is a continuation of that discussed in Ch. VIII, ii (with Note 7);
in connexion with which, with reference to Brazil, the comment of
Couto de Magalhaes is significant (part ii, p. 122): “Como quer que
seja, a idea de un Deus todo poderoso, e unico, nao foi possuida pelos
nossos selvagens ao tempo da descoberta da America; e pois nao era
possival que sua lingua tivesse uma palvra que a podesse expressar.
Ha no entretanto um principio superior qualificado com o nome
de Tupan a quern parece que attribuiam maior poder do que aos
outras.” The real question to be resolved is what are the necessary
attributes of a “supreme being.” Cf. Mythology of All Nations, x,
Note 6.

17.   On wood-demons and the like, in addition to Cardim, see
Teschauer [a], pp. 24-34; Koch-Griinberg, [a], i. 190; ii. 157; and
Granada, ch. xxxi, “Demonios, apariciones, fantasmas, etc.”

18.   On ghosts and metamorphoses, see Ignace, pp. 952—53; Fric
and Radin; Fric [a]; von Rosen, p. 657; and Cook, p. 122.

19.   On were-beasts, see Ambrosetti ; cf. Garcilasso de la Vega,
bk. i, ch. ix.

20.   Loci citati touching cannibalism are Haseman, pp. 345-46;
Staden [a], ch. xliii; , chh. xxv, xxviii; Cardim (Purchas), ii.
431-40; and Whiffen, pp. 118—24.

21.   Von den Steinen , p. 323.

22.   Couto de Magalhaes, part i, texts.

23.   Steere, “Narrative of a Visit to the Indian tribes on the Purus
 376 LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

River,” in Report of the U. S. National Museum, igoi (Washington,
I9°3)-

24.   Loci citati are Ehrenreich , pp. 34-40; [c], p. 34; Markham
[d], p. 119; von den Steinen [a], p. 283; , pp. 322 ff.; Teschauer [a],
pp. 731 ff. (citing Barbosa Rodrigues and others); Koch-Griinberg
, no. 1.

25.   Feliciano de Oliveira, CA xviii (London, 1913), pp. 394-96.

26.   Teschauer [a], p.731. The Kaduveo genesis is given by Fric,
in CA xviii, 397 ff. Stories of both types are widespread through-
out the two Americas.

27.   Couto de Magalhaes, part i, texts. This is among the most
interesting of all American myths; it is clearly cosmogonic in char-
acter, yet it reverses the customary procedure of cosmogonies, be-
ginning with an illuminated world rather than a chaotic gloom.
Possibly this is an indication of primitiveness, for the conception of
night and chaos as the antecedent of cosmic order would seem to call
for a certain degree of imaginative austerity; it is not simple nor
childlike.

28.   Cardim (Purchas), p. 418.

29.   Adam , p. 319. Other sources for tales of the deluge are
Borba , pp. 223-25; Kissenberth, in ZE xl. 49; Ehrenreich ,
pp. 30-31; Teschauer; and von Martius.

30.   D’Orbigny, iii. 209-14; von den Steinen [a], pp. 282-85; ,
pp. 322-27; and cf. the Kapoi legends in Koch-Grunberg [a]. The
Yuracara tale narrated by d’Orbigny is one of the best and most
fully reported of South American myths.

Chapter X

1.   On the physical and ethnological conditions of the Chaco and
the Abiponean districts the important authorities are Dobrizhoffer;
Grubb [a], ; Koch, “Zur Ethnographic der Paraguay-Gebiete,”
in MitAGW xxxiii (1903); for the southern region important are,
Voyages of the Adventure and the Beagle; the publications of the
Mission scientifique du Cap Horn; Cooper, Analytical and Critical
Bibliography of the Tribes of Tierra del Fuego and Adjacent Territory
(<5j BBE), with map; and El Norte de la Patagonia, with map, pub-
lished by the Argentine Ministry of Public Works, Buenos Aires, 1914.

2.   D’Orbigny, UHomme americain, p. 233; J. Guevara, Historia,
pp. 32, 265 (citing Fernandez, Relacion historial, p. 39).

3.   Dobrizhoffer, ii, ch. viii (pp. 57-59, 64-65 quoted); ch. x (p. 94
quoted).

[Prometheus]

4.   Grubb , chh. xi, xii, xiv (pp. 139-41 quoted), xvi (p. 163
quoted); cf. Karsten, sections i, iii.
 NOTES

377

5.   T. Guevara [a], i, ch. viii, “Los mitos y las ideas relijiosas de
los Indios,” pp. 223-25. Latcham, JAl xxxix, gives an account of
Araucanian ideas, in general corresponding to Guevara, to whom
he is apparently indebted.

6.   Molina, ch. v (pp. 84, 86, 91 quoted).

7.   Vicuna Cifuentes, especially sections vi—xi, xiv—xvi, xxi-xxiii.
This work is particularly valuable in that it collects the statements
of many authorities in regard to the creatures of Chilean folk-lore.

8.   Dobrizhoffer, ii. 89-90.

9.   The cosmogony is in Molina, ch. v; the tale of the two brothers
in Lenz, p. 225.

10.   Pigafetta, in The First Voyage Around the World by Magellan
(HS, series i, 1874), pp. 50-55; the “Genoese Pilot,” ib, p. 5.

11.   Dobrizhoffer, ii. 89-90.

12.   Prichard, pp. 85-86, 97-98. To Prichard’s evidence may be
added that of Captain R. N. Musters, another recent traveller,
quoted by Church, Aborigines of South America, pp. 294-95: “The
religion of the Tehuelches is distinguished from that of the Arau-
canians and Pampas by the absence of any trace of sun worship. . . .
There is no doubt that they do believe in a good Spirit, though they
think he lives ‘careless of mankind’”; Captain Musters regards the
gualichu as a class of daemonic powers — an altogether probable
interpretation.

13.   D’Orbigny, UHomme americain, pp. 220, 225; Voyage of the
Beagle, ii. 161-62; cf. also i, ch. vi.

14.   Deniker gives the myth of El-lal, after Lista.

15.   Darwin, pp. 240-42; Bridges, in RevMP iii, p. 24.

16.   Fitzroy, ch. ix, pp. 180-81.

17.   Hyades and Deniker, ch. v, pp. 254-57.

18.   Cooper, dj BBE, pp. 145 ff., summarizes the scanty gleanings
from the notes of travellers and missionaries touching Fuegian re-
ligious conceptions. The reference to the Salesian fathers (p. 147)
is quoted from Cojazzi (p. 124); that to Captain Low is from Fitzroy
(P- 190).

19.   Cooper, op. cit., pp. 162-64, citing various authorities.

20.   Despard, quoted by Cooper, op. cit., p. 148.
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY

I.   ABBREVIATIONS

AA............American Anthropologist.

AnMB   .   .   .   Anales del Museo Nacional   de Buenos Aires.

AnMM   .   .   .   Anales del Museo Nacional   de Mexico.

AnMG.   .   .   .   Annales du Musee Guimet.

ARBE ....   Annual Report of the Bureau of American   Ethnol-

ogy, Washington.

BBE .... Bulletin of the Bureau of American Ethnology,
Washington.

CA............Comptes rendus du Congres des Americanistes.

ERE .... Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics.

HS............Works issued by the Hakluyt Society.

JAFL .... Journal of American Folklore.

JAI...........Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great

Britain and Ireland.

JSAP .... Journal de la Societe des Americanistes de Paris.
MitAGW. . . Mitteilungen der Anthropologischen Gesellschaft
in Wien.

MPM .... Memoirs of the Peabody Museum, Cambridge.
PaPM.... Papers of the Peabody Museum.

RevMP.... Revista .del Museo de La Plata.

SocAA. . . . Memorias y Revista de la Sociedad cientifica
“Antonio Alzate.”

TC............Voyages, Relations et Memoires originaux pour

servir a l’histoire de la decouverte de l’Amerique.
H. Ternaux-Compans, editor.

ZE............Zeitschrift fur Ethnologie.

II.   BIBLIOGRAPHICAL GUIDES

Analytical and Critical Bibliography of the Tribes of Tierra del Fuego
and Adjacent Territory (6j BBE). By John M. Cooper. Wash-
ington, 1917.

A Study of Maya Art, “Bibliography.” By H. J. Spinden. In MPM
vi (1913).
 382 LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

Bibliografia Mexicana del siglo XVI. By Joaquin Garcia Icaz-
balceta. Mexico, 1866.

Bibliography of the Anthropology of Peru. By Geo. A. Dorsey.
Publications of the Field Columbian Museum, Anthropological
Series, ii, 1898.

Bibliography of Peru. A.D. 1526-1007. By Sir Clements Markham.
HS, series ii, Vol. xxii. Cambridge, 1907.

Bibliotheca Americana Vetustissima. By H. Harisse. New York,
1866. Additions, Paris, 1872.

Biblioiheque americaine ou catalogue des ouvrages relatifs a PAmerique
qui ont paru depuis sa decouverte jusqu’a Pan 1700. By H.
Ternaux-Compans. Paris, 1837.

Catalogue de livres rares et precieux, manuscrits et imprimes, principale-
ment sur PAmerique et sur les langues du monde enlier, composant
la biblioiheque de M. Alph.-L. Pinart. Paris, 1883.

Dictionary of Works Relating to America from the Discovery to the
Present Time. By Joseph Sabin. Vols. i-xx. New York,
1868-92.

Die Mythen und Legenden der siidamerikanischen Urvolker. “ Litera-
turverzeichnis.” By Paul Ehrenreich. Berlin, 1905.

Ensayo bibliografico Mexicano del siglo XVII. By Vincente de P.
Andrade. Mexico, 1900.

“Ergebnisse und Aufgaben der mexikanistischen Forschung.” By
Walter Lehmann. In Archiv fur Anthropologie, neue Folge,
Band vi (1907). Tr. Seymour de Ricci, Methods and Results
in Mexican Research, Paris, 1909.

Essai sur les sources de Phistoire des Antilles franqaise (1402-1664).

By Jacques de Dampierre. Paris, 1904.

Historiadores de Yucatan. By Gustavo Martinez Alomia. Cam-
peche, 1906.

History of Spanish Literature. By George Ticknor. 3 vols. Boston,
1854. 4th ed., Boston, no date.

Idea de una nueva historia general de la America septentrional, with
Catalogo del Museo Historico Indiano. By Lorenzo Boturini
Benaducci. Madrid, 1746; also, Mexico, 1887.

Las Publicaciones del Museo Nacional de Arqueologia. By Juan B.
Iguinez. Mexico, 1913.

List of Publications of the Bureau of American Ethnology (58 BBE).
Washington, 1914.

Manuel dP archeologie americaine. “Bibliographic.” By H. Beuchat.
Paris, 1912.
 BIBLIOGRAPHY   383

“Museo Mitre” Catalogo de la biblioteca. Published by the Minis-
terio de Justicia e Instruccion Publica. Buenos Aires.

Narrative and Critical History of America. By Justin Winsor. Vol. i,
Aboriginal America, “Bibliographical Appendix.” Boston, 1889.

Native Races of the Pacific States of North America. By H. H. Ban-
croft. Vol. i, “Authorities Quoted.” New York, 1785.

“Notes on the Bibliography of Yucatan and Central America.” By
A. F. Bandelier. In American Antiquarian, new series, i (1882).

“Recent Literature on the South American Amazons.” By A. F.
Chamberlain. In JAFL, xxiv (1911).

Note. — Where important bibliographies are attached to works here below listed

the fact is indicated: ** Bibliography.

III.   ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND ETHNOLOGICAL GUIDES

Aborigines of South America. By Col. G. E. Church. London, 1912.
“A list of the Tribes of the Valley of the Amazons.” By Sir Clements
Markham. In JAI xl (1910).

Ancient Civilizations of Mexico and Central America (American
Museum of Natural History, Handbook Series, No. j). By H. J.
Spinden. New York, 1917.

“Areas of American Culture.” By W. H. Holmes. In A A, new series,
xvi (1914). Also in Anthropology in North America, by F. Boas
and others; New York, 1915. With map.

A Study of Maya Art. By H. J. Spinden. In MPM vi (1913).
Beitrage zur Ethnographie und Sprachenkunde Amerikas. By C. P.
von Martius. Leipzig, 1867.

Biologia Centrali-Americana. Archaeology. By A. P. Maudsley.
4 vols. London, 1889-1902.

Catalogo de la coleccion de Antropologia del Museo Nacional. By
Alonso Herrera and Ricardo E. Cicero. Mexico. 1895.
Central and South America. By A. H. Keane. 2 vols. London, 1901.
Early Man in South America (52 BBE). By Ales Hrdlicka.
Washington, 1912.

Familias linguisticas de Mexico. By Nicolas Leon. Mexico, 1877;

2d ed., 1902. Also in AnMM vii (1903). With map.

Geografia de las lenguas y carta etnografica de Mexico. By Manuel
Orozco y Berra. Mexico, 1864. With map.

Indian Languages of Mexico and Central America (44 BBE). By
Cyrus Thomas and John R. Swanton. Washington, 1911.
** Bibliography and map.
 384 LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

In Indian Mexico. By Frederick Starr. Chicago, 1908. Also,
Notes Upon the Ethnography of Southern Mexico (Proceedings of
the Davenport Academy of Science, ix). Davenport, 1902.

Introduction to the Study of North American Archeology. By Cyrus
Thomas. Cincinnati, 1903.

“ Kulturkreise und Kulturschichten in Sudamerika.” By W. Schmidt.
In ZE xlv (1913). **Bibliography and map.

L’Homme Americain. By Alcide Dessalines d’Orbigny. Tome iv
of Voyage dans VAmerique meridionale . . . execute pendant les
annees 1826-1833; 9 vols., Paris, 1835-47.

“Linguistic Stocks of South American Indians.” By A. F. Chamber-
lain. In A A, new series, xv (1913). Also, “South American
Linguistic Stocks,” in CA xv. 2 (1908).

Manuel d’archeologie americaine. By H. Beuchat. Paris, 1912.

Moseteno Vocabulary and Treatises. By Benigno Bibolotti; with
introduction by R. Schuller. Evanston and Chicago, 1917.
**Bibliography and map (Bolivian Indians).

“Origenes Etnograficos de Colombia.” By Carlos Cuervo Mar-
quez. In Proceedings of the Second Pan American Scientific
Congress, Vol. i. Washington, 1917.

Pre-Historic America. By the Marquis de Nadaillac; ed. W. H.
Dall, London and New York, 1884.

South American Archaeology, London, 1912; Mexican Archaeology,
London, 1914; Central American and West Indian Archaeology,
London, 1916. By T. A. Joyce.

The American Indian. An Introduction to the Anthropology of the
New World. By Clark Wissler. New York, 1917.

“The Indian Linguistic Stocks of Oaxaca, Mexico.” By Wm. H.
Mechling. In A A, new series, xiv (1912). ** Bibliography.

“The Origin and Distribution of Agriculture in America.” By H. J.
Spinden. In CA xix (Washington, 1917).

IV.   GENERAL WORKS
(a) Critical and Comparative

Bancroft, H. H., The Native Races of the Pacific States. 5 vols. New
York, 1875.

Bastian, A., Die Culturldnder des Alten America. 3 vols. Berlin,
1878-89.

Boas, Franz, The Mind of Primitive Man. New York, 1911.
 BIBLIOGRAPHY   385

Brinton, Daniel G., [a], Myths of the New World. 3d ed. Philadel-
phia, 1896.

------, American Hero Myths. Philadelphia, 1882.

------[c], Essays of an Americanist. Philadelphia, 1890.

Ehrenreich, Paul, [a], Die allgemeine Mythologie und ihre ethnolo-
gischen Grundlagen. Leipzig, 1910.

Falies, Louis, Etudes historiques et philosophiques sur les civilisa-
tions. 2 vols. Paris, no date.

Graebner, Fritz, Methode der Ethnologie. Heidelberg, 1911.

Lafitau, J. F., Moeurs des sauvages ameriquains. Tomes i-ii. Paris,
1724. (An edition in 4 vols. was issued simultaneously.)

Muller, J. G., Geschichte der amerikanischen Urreligionen. Basel,
1867.

Nuttall, Zelia, [a], The Fundamental Principles of Old and New
World Civilizations (PaPM ii). Cambridge, 1901.

Payne, Edward J., History of the New World called America. 2 vols.
Oxford and New York, 1892, 1899.

Sapir, E., Time Perspective in Aboriginal American Culture, A Study
in Method (C. S. C., Anthropological Series, No. if). Ottawa,
1916.

Thevet, Andre, Cosmographie universelle. Paris, 1575.

(b) Important Collections

Anales del Museo Nacional de Buenos Aires. Vols. i-iii, 1864-91;
second series, Vols. i-iv, 1895-1902; third series, Vols. i ff.,
1902 ff. Buenos Aires.

Anales del Museo Nacional de Mexico. Vols. i-vii, 1877-1903; sec-
ond series, Vols. i-v, 1903-09; third series, Vols. i ff., 1909 ff.
Mexico.   1

Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology (Smithsonian
Institution). Washington, 1881 ff.

Anthropological Publications, University of Pennsylvania, The Mu-
seum. Vols. i ff., 1909 ff. Philadelphia.

Antiquities of Mexico, comprising facsimiles of Ancient Mexican
Paintings and Hieroglyphics . . . together with the Monuments of
New Spain, by M. Dupaix . . . the whole illustrated by many
valuable inedited manuscripts, by Lord Kingsborough. Vols. i-ix.
London, 1831-48.

Biblioteca maritima espahola. Ed. Martin Fernandez de Navar-
rete. 2 vols. Madrid, 1851.
 386 LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

Bibliotheque de linguistique et d’ethnographic americaines. Ed. A.
Pinart. Vols. i-iv. San Francisco, 1876-82.

Bulletin of the Bureau of American Ethnology {Smithsonian Institu-
tion). Washington, 1887 ff.

Coleccion de documentos ineditos para la historia de Espaha y de sus
Indias. Vols. i-xlii, 1864-84; second series, Vols. i-xiii, 1885-
1900. Madrid. Also, Nueva coleccion, etc., Vols. i-vi, 1892-96.
Madrid.

Coleccion de documentos ineditos relativos al descubrimiento, conquista,
y organizacion de las antiguas posesiones espanolas de America y
Oceania. Vols. i.-xlii. Madrid, 1864-84. Second series [Coleccion
de documentos ineditos . . . de Ultramar], Vols. i ff., 1885 ff.

Coleccion de documentos ineditos para la historia de Espana. Vols.
i-cxii. Ed. M. F. de Navarrete and others. Madrid, 1842-95.

Coleccion de libros raros 6 curiosos que tratan de America. Vols. i ff.
Madrid, 1891 ff.

Coleccion de los viages y descubrimientos que hicieron por mar los
Espanoles desde fines del siglo XV. Ed. Martin Fernandez
de Navarrete. 5 vols. Madrid, 1835-37.

Coleccion de documentos para la historia de Mexico. Ed. J. Garcia
Icazbalceta. 2 vols. Mexico, 1858,1866. Also,Nueva Coleccion,
etc., 4 vols., Mexico, 1886-1892; and ed. A. Penafiel, Coleccion
de documentos para la historia mexicana, Vols. i-vi. Mexico,
1897-1903.

Comptes rendus du Congres international des Americanistes. Paris and
elsewhere (biennially), 1878 ff.

Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics. Ed. Jas. Hastings. Vols. i ff.,
1908 ff. Edinburgh and New York.

Hakluyt’s Voyages. Vols. i-xii. Glasgow, 1904.

Hakluytus Posthumus, or Purchas his Pilgrimes. Vols. i-xx. Glasgow,
1905-1907.

Historiadores de las Indias. (Nueva biblioteca de autores Espanoles,
Nos. 13, 14.) Ed. Manuel Serrano y Sanz. 2 vols. Madrid,
1909. Tomo i, Apologetica historia de las Indias, de Fr. Bar-
tolome de las Casas. Tomo ii, Guerra de Quito, de Cieza de Leon;
Jornada del Rio Mar anon, de Toribio de Ortiguera; Jornada de
Omagua y Dorado; Descripcion del Peru, Tucuman, Rio de la
Plata y Chile, de Fr. Reginaldo de Lizarraga.

Historiadores primitivos de las Indias Occidentales. Ed. A. G. Barcia.
3 vols. Madrid, 1749.

Historiadores primitivos de Indias {Biblioteca de autores Espanoles).
Ed. Enrique de Vedia. 2 vols. Madrid, 1852, 1862. Tomo i,
 BIBLIOGRAPHY

387

Cartas de relation, de Cortes; Hispania Victrix, de Lopez de
Gomara; Natural historia de las Indias, de Oviedo y Valdes; etc.
Tomo ii, Verdadera historia, de Bernal Diaz del Castillo; Con-
quista del Peru, de Francisco de Jerez; Cronica del Peru, de Cieza
de Leon; Historia . . . del Peru, de Augustin de Zarate.

Journal de la Societe des Americanistes de Paris. Vols. i-v, 1895-1904;

new series, Vols. i ff., 1908 ff. Paris.

Library of Aboriginal American Literature. Ed. Daniel G. Brinton.

8 vols. Philadelphia, 1882-90.

Memoirs of the Peabody Museum. Cambridge, 1896 ff.

Papers of the Peabody Museum. Cambridge, 1888 ff.

Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society. New series. Worces-
ter, 1882 ff.

Proceedings of the Second Pan American Scientific Congress. Vol. i.
Section I, Anthropology. Washington, 1917.

Publications of the Field Columbian Museum, Anthropological Series.
Vols. i ff. Chicago, 1895 ff.

Relaciones historicas de America. Primera mitad del siglo XVI. With
introduction by Manuel Serrano y Sanz. Madrid, 1916.
Relaciones historicas y geograficas de America Central. With intro-
duction by Manuel Serrano y Sanz. Madrid, 1908.

Revista del Museo de la Plata. La Plata, 1890 ff.

Voyages, relations et memoires originaux pour servir a Vhistoire de la
decouverte de PAmerique. Ed. H. Ternaux-Compans. Vols. i-xx.
Paris, 1837-41. Also, with other editors, Nouvelles annales des
Voyages, etc., in six series, Paris, 1819-65.

Works Issued by the Hakluyt Society. Vols. i-c. London, 1847-98.
Second series, Vols. i ff., 1899 ff*

V.   SELECT AUTHORITIES
Chapter I

Abbad y Lasierra, Fray Inigo, Historia geografica, civil y natural
de la is la de San Juan Bautista de Puerto Rico. With notes
by Jose Julian de Acosta y Calbo. Porto Rico, 1866.

Adam, Lucien, [a], Le parler des hommes et des femmes dans la langue
Caraibe. Paris, 1890.

Ballet, J., “Les Caraibes,” in CA i. I (Nancy, 1875).

Bachiller y Morales, Antonio, Cuba primitiva. 2d ed. Havana,
1883.
 388 LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

Benzoni, Girolamo, Historia del Mondo Nuovo. Venice, 1565. Tr.
W. H. Smyth, History of the New World (HS). London, 1857.

Booey,Theodoorde, [a], “Lucayan Remains on the Caicos Islands,”
in AA, new series, xiv (1912).

------, “Pottery from Certain Caves in Eastern Santo Do-
mingo,” in AA, new series, xvii (1915).

Charlevoix, Pierre Francois Xavier de, Histoire de l’Isle Es-
pagnole ou de Saint-Domingue. 2 vols. Paris, 1730-31; also,
Amsterdam, 1733.

Coll y Toste, Cayetano, Colon en Puerto Rico. Porto Rico, 1893.

Columbus, Christopher, Letters, Journal, etc. — Editions, com-
plete or in part: M. F. de Navarrete, Coleccion de los viages y
descubrimientos de los Espaholes, Vol. i, Madrid, 1825; H. Ha-
risse, Christophe Colomb, Vol. ii, Appendix, Paris, 1885; R. H.
Major, Select Letters of Christopher Columbus (HS), 2d ed., Lon-
don, 1870 (contains critical bibliography); Clements Markham,
Journal of Christopher Columbus (HS), London, 1893; John
Boyd Thacher, Christopher Columbus, 2 vols., New York,
1903-04; Edward Gaylord Bourne, “The Voyages of Colum-
bus and John Cabot,” in The Northmen and Columbus (Original
Narratives of Early American History), New York, 1906 (with
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------, Histoire de la nation mexicaine depuis le depart d’Aztlan

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Bancroft, H. H., The Native Races of the Pacific States. 5 vols. New
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Bastian, A., Die Culturlander des alten America. 3 vols. Berlin,
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Batres, Leopoldo, Teotihuacan, 6 la ciudad sagrada de los Tolteca.
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Castellanos, Abraham, [a], El rey Iukano y los hombres del oriente,
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Cervantes de Salazar, Francisco, Cronica de la Nueva Espaha.
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Charency, le Comte de, [a], “Des ages ou Soleils d’apres la mytholo-
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Charnay, Desire, [a], Ancient Cities of the New World. New York,
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Chimalpahin Quauhtlehuanitzin, Domingo Francisco de San
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Codex. Mexican codices include, (a) hieroglyphic manuscripts, pre-
and post-Columbian, chiefly (1) mytho-historical and (2) calen-
dric and divinatory, and (b) post-Columbian writings, Nahuatl
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Antiguedades Mexicanas (containing reproductions of Manu-
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Aubin”); Buelna; Duran (“Album”); Fabrega; Garcia Cu-
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of Recent Reproductions,” in A A, new series, iii (1901), and in
Lehmann [a], below; while a detailed bibliography, covering the
earlier collections and publications, is given by Jesus Galindo
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seur de Bourbourg [a], Introduction, for analysis of sources and
account of his own discoveries.

Codice Ramirez. See Tobar, infra.

Cortes, (Cortez) Hernando, Cartas de relacion (Historiadores primi-
tives de Indias, Tomo i). Madrid,1 1858. Tr. F. MacNutt,
Letters of Cortes to Charles V, London, 1908.

Cordoba, Juan de, Arte del idioma Zapoteca. Mexico, 1578; also,
Morelia, 1886.

Diaz del Castillo, Bernal, Historia verdadera de la conquista de la
Nueva Espana. Madrid, 1632. Tr. A. Jourdanet, Histoire
veridique de la conquete de la Nouvelle-Espagne, 2d ed., Paris,
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New Spain (HS, series ii, Vols. xxiii-v, xxx, xl), London, 1908-16.

Duran, Diego, Historia de las Indias de Nueva Espana y islas de
tierra firme. 2 vols. and album. Mexico, 1867-1880.

Fabrega, Jose Lino, S. J., Interpretacion del codice Borgiano. Italian
text with Spanish tr. and notes by A. Chavero and F. del Paso
y Troncoso, in AnMM v (Mexico, 1899).
 LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

394

Fewkes, J. W., [g], “Certain Antiquities of Eastern Mexico,” in 25
ARBE (Washington, 1907).

-------[h], “Ancient Pueblo and Mexican Water Symbol,” and “A

Central American Ceremony which suggests the Snake Dance,”
in AA vi (1893).

Gamio, Manuel, “Investigaciones Arqueologicas en Mexico, 1914-
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Garcia, Gregorio, Origen de los Indios del Nuevo Mundo y Indias
occidentales. Ed. Barcia. Madrid, 1729.

Garcia Cubas, Antonio, [a], Atlas geografico, estadistico y historico
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-------, “Estudio comparative de dos documentos historicos,” in

CA xvii. 2 (Mexico, 1912).

Garcia Icazbalceta, Joaquin, [a], Coleccion de documentos para la
historia de Mexico. 2 vols. Mexico, 1858-1866. (Contains writ-
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authors.)

-------, Nueva coleccion de documentos para la historia de Mexico.

5 vols. Mexico, 1886-1892. (Writings of early missionaries,
of Pomar, Zurita, and Mendieta, native manuscripts, etc.)

Genin, Auguste, “Notes sur les danses, la musique et les chants des
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Gomara, Francisco Lopez de, , Historia de Mexico, con el descu-
brimiento de la Nueva Espaha, conquistada por el muy illustre
y valeroso principe Don Fernando Cortes, marques del Valle.
Anvers, 1554. Also, Segunda parte de la crdnica general de las
Indias, que trata de la conquista de Mejico (Historiadores primitivos
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Haebler, Konrad, Die Religion des mittleren Amerika. Munster in
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Hagar, Stansbury, [a], “Elements of the Maya and Mexican
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-------, “Zodiacal Symbolism of the Mexican and Maya Month

and Day Signs,” in CA xvii. 2 (Mexico, 1912).

Hamy, E. T., [a], Codex Borbonicus. Paris, 1899.

-------, “Croyances et pratiques religieuses des premieres Mexi-
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Helps, Arthur, The Spanish Conquest in America. 4 vols. New
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Herrera, Antonio de. See Bibliography to Chapter I.
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395

Historia de los Mexicanos por sus pinturas. Published by Icazbal-
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from a manuscript entitled Libro de oro y thesoro Indico, and also
known as Codex Zumarraga and Codex Fuenleal. Tr. Henry
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Historia de los Reynos de Colhuacan y de Mexico. Nahuatl text with
Latin tr. by Walter Lehmann, in JSAP, new series, iii (1906).
The first part of this important document was published with
Spanish trs. by Jose Fernando Ramirez in AnMM iii (Mexico,
1885), under the title Anales de Cuauhtitlan {The Annals of
Quauhtitlan is the usual English form) by which it is usually
cited. The Abbe Brasseur de Bourbourg gives the text and
translation of a small portion of the document, called by him,
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bibliographical discussion of the document is given by Lehmann
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Holmes, Wm. H., [a], Archaeological Studies Among the Ancient
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Humboldt, Alexander von, [a] Vues des Cordilleres. Paris, 1802.
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Ixtlilxochitl, Hernando de Alva, Historia Chichimeca and Re-
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Jonghe, E. de, “Le calendrier mexicain,” in JSAP, new series, iii
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Jourdanet, A. See Diaz del Castillo, supra; Sahagun, infra.

Joyce, T. A., . Mexican Archaeology. London, 1916.

Kingsborough, Lord, Antiquities of Mexico, 9 vols. London,
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Krumm-Heller, Arnolfo, “El Zodiaco de los Incas en comparacion
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La Serna, Jacinto de, Manual de ministros de Indios para el conoci-
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LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

Mexico, 1892; also, in Coleccion de documentos ineditos para la
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-------[d], Lyobsa 6 Mictlan, Guia historico-descriptiva. Mexico,

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Leon y Gama, Antonio de, Descripcion historica y cronologica de las
dos piedras que con ocasion del nuevo empedrado que se esta for-
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Loubat, le Due de. Chromophotographic reproductions of Codices
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Lumholtz, Carl, [a], “Symbolism of the Huichol Indians,” in
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-------, Unknown Mexico. 2 vols. New York, 1902.

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MacCurdy, Geo. G., [a], “An Aztec ‘Calendar Stone’ in Yale Uni-
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McGee, W G, “The Seri Indians,” in 17 ARBE, part i.

Mason, J. Alden, “Folk-Tales of the Tepecanos,” in JAFL xxvii
(1914).

Mayer, Brantz, Mexico: Aztec, Spanish and Republican. 2 vols.
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Mechling, Wm. H., [a], “Stories from Tuxtepec, Oaxaca,” in JAFL
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Mendieta, Geronimo de, Historia eclesidstica Indiana, obra escrita
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Mendoza, G., “Cosmogonia Azteca,” in AnMM i (Mexico, 1877);
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Munoz Camargo, Diego, Historia de Tlaxcala. Ed. A. Chavero.
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Nuttall, Zelia, [a]. See Bibliography, IV. Also author of numer-
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Olmos, Andres de. Author of a compendious work, now lost, pre-
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Orozco y Berra, Manuel, [a], Ojeada sobre cronologia Mexicana.
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[Prometheus]

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 400

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 406   LATIN-AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

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